is^Mse 



;:,::,.: :-^:i^ ;./;'.. p^r- 



:r.;;i-t:T^ii 



T-: 



i 







---T-^. 



S?!'' 



'.^,T^ 






V ^^ ""., -'e^. 



V^ ,. ^ ' 








,-«^ °^ = 














L^' 



^.^ -^0^ ^* 



^ 



'^^l.c^ 



^ ^^ 



." .^ 



'^'^. 






*^ 






V 
















£mh 



.^ *' 






^ -CO 












6 

















S 







G 




^^0^ : 






>0^ . s -^ ' 






.V= -". .^^ : 








"^^-^ 



i^- Q<N o 



,<^ ^ ' 



NX 



,:^ 



■v,'^ ^ 
. ^ 







^.""^ 



AN 



ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY; 



WITH 



^ OTICES OF THE BRITISH POETS. 



BY 



THOMAS CAMPBELL, 

AUTHOR OF 'the PI-EASURES OF HOPE,' &C. 




LONDON: 
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 

1848. 



ADVEETISEMENT. ^<^ 






The following reprint of Mr. Campbell's Essay on Engl^ Poetry, and 
his Prefatory Notices of the principal English Poets, has been made to 
supply a want w^hich many have felt of a pocket edition of the work 
without the Specimens. The Essay and Notices are complete in them- 
selves, and the real value of the work may be said to consist, not in the 
selection of extracts, which, from a desire not to give the same specimens 
as Ellis or Headley had given, is often defective and unjust, but in the 
beautiful discriminating character of the criticisms, and the wider feeling 
which the work evinces for poetry in its enlarged sense than is to be 
found in any other body of criticism in the English language. No 
work indeed of any importance on our literary history has been written 
since they were published without commendatory references to them. 
They have been appealed to by Lord Byron, applaudingly quoted by 
Sir Walter Scott, and frequently cited and referred to by Mr. Hallam. 

For the notes distinguished throughout by brackets the present 
Editor is responsible, to whom, with Mr. Campbell's express approval, 
the revision of the second edition was intrusted. Various inaccuracies 
of the former editions have been removed in this — some silently, for it 
•would have burdened the book wuth useless matter to have retained them 
in the text, and pointed them out m a note — while others, entangled in 
a thought, have been allowed to st^nd, but not without notes to stop 
the perpetuity of the error. Mr. Campbell is not properly chargeable 
■with many of the inaccuracies in dates and mere minutiae discovered 
since he wrote ; some may be laid to the excursive nature of his task, 
and others to the imperfect information of the period. 

The first edition of Mr. Campbell's work appeared in 1819, in 7 vols. 
8vo., and the second in 1841, in one thick volume 8vo. 

Peteb Cunningham. 
Kensington, 2bth October, 1848. 




CONTENTS, 



C9f 



I Page 

fcsSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY— Part 1 1 

Part II 34 

! ,, ,, ,, PartIII 83 

JCOTTISH POETRY 118 



LIVES OF BRITISH POETS. 





Page 




Page 


Geoffrey Chaucer . 


123 


Alexander Hume 


165 


John Gower . . . 


135 


Thomas Nash. . . 


166 


John Lydgate . . 


136 


Edward Vere, Earl of 




James I. of Scotland 


137 


Oxford .... 


167 


Kobert Henrysone . 


138 


Thomas Storer . . 


168 


William Dunbar . 


138 


Joseph Hall . . . 


168 


Sir David Lyndsay . 


139 


WilUam Warner . . 


172 


Sir Thomas Wyat . 


141 


Sir John Harrington 


173 


Henry Howard, Earl 




Henry Perrot. . . 


173 


of Surrey . . . 


144 


Sir Thomas Overbury 


173 


iLord Vaux . . . 


149 


Sir Walter Raleigh . 


174 


Richard Edwards . 


149 


Joshua Sylvester . . 


176 


WilUam Hunnis . . 


150 


Samuel Daniel 


177 


Thomas Sackville,Ba- 




Giles and Phineas 




ron Buckhurst and 




Fletcher. . . . 


178 


Earl of Dorset. . 


150 


Henry Constable . . 


180 


George. Gascoigne . 


152 


Nicholas Breton . 


180 


John Harrington. 


153 


Dr. Thomas Lodge . 


180 


Sir Philip Sydney . 


154 


Beaumont and 




Robert Greene . . 


155 


Fletcher. . . . 


181 


Christopher Marlowe 


156 


Sir John Davies . 


184 


lobert Southwell . 


157 


Thomas Goffe. • . 


185 


\ lomas Watson . . 


158 


Sir Fulke GreviUe . 


185 


Edmund Spenser. . 


158 


Sir John Beaumont . 


185 


John Lyly . . . . 


164 


Michael Drayton. . 


186 



Page 

Edward Fairfax . . 188 

Samuel Rowlands . 190 

John Donne . .' . 190 

Thomas Picke . .192 

George Herbert . .192 

John Marston. . .193 

George Chapman. . 194 

Thomas Randolph . 195 

Richard Corbet . .196 

Thomas Middleton . 196 

Richard Niccols . .197 

Charles Fitzgeffrey . 197 

Ben Jonson . . .198 

Thomas Carew . . 206 

Sir Henry Wotton . 207 
William Alexander, 

EarlofSterline . 208 

Nathaniel Field . . 208 

Thomas Dekker . . 209 

John Webster . . 210 

John Ford . . .210 

WilUam Rowley . . 211 

Philip Massinger. . 212 

Sir John Suckling . 214 
William Cartwright . 215 



Page 
George Sandys . . 216 
Francis Quarles . .216 
William Browne . . 217 
Thomas Nabbes . . 218 
Thomas Heywood . 219 
William Drummond. 220 
Thomas May . . .222 
Richard Crashaw . 223 
William Habington . 224 
William Chamber- 

layne . . . .225 
Richard Lovelace . 226 
Katherine PhiUps . 227 
William Heminge . 2^ 
James Shhrley . . 228* 
Alexander Brome . 228 
Robert Herrick . . 229 
Abraham Cowley . 230 
Sir Richard Fanshawe 232 
Sir William Davenant 232 
Sir John Denham . 233 
George Wither . . 234 
Jasper Mayne . . 237 
Richard Brathwaite . 238 
John Milton . . .238 
Andrew Marvell . . 241 
Samuel Butler . . 243 
Charles Cotton . . 243 
Dr. Henry More . . 244 
George Etherege. . 245 
Nathaniel Lee . . 246 
Thomas Shadwell . 247 
Henry Vaughan . . 247 
JohnPomfret . . 247 
Thomas Brown . . 248 
Charles Sackville, Earl 

of Dorset ... 248 
George Stepney . . 248 
John Philips ... 248 



CONTENTS. 




./^f 


WilUam Walsh 
Thomas ParneU 


Page 
. . 249 
. . 250 


Mark Akenside . . 
Thomas Chatterton . 


Pag. 
29f 
29< 


Samuel Garth. . . 251 
Peter Anthony Mot- 

teux 252 

Matthew Prior . . 252 


Christopher Smart . 
Thomas Gray . . . 
Cuthbert Shaw . . 
Tobias Smollett . . 


304 
30't 
31C 
311 


Dr. George Sewe 
Sir John Vanbruj 
Elijah Fenton. 
Edward Ward 


11 . 253 
?h . 253 
. . 254 
. . 255 


George Lord Lyttelton 314 
Robert Fergusson . 315 
Oliver Goldsmith . 316 
Paul Whitehead. . 327 


John Gay . . 
Matthew Green 


. . 255 
. . 256 


Walter Harte. . . 
John Armstrong . 


329 
332 


George Lillo . 
Thomas TickeU 


. . 257 
. . 260 


John Langhome. 
Thomas Penrose . . 


a37 
341 


Alexander Pope 
James Bramston 


. . 260 
. . 262 


Henry Brooke . . 
John Scott . . . 


343 
345i 


Wilham Meston . 


. 262 


George Alexander 




Robert Blair . 


. . 263 


Stevens .... 


346 


James Thomson 


. . 263 


WiUiam Whitehead . 


347, 


Isaac Watts . 


. . 267 


Richard Glover . . 


354j 


Ambrose Philips 
Leonard Welsted 
Amhurst Selden 


. . 267 
. 268 
. 268 


Edward Thompson . 
Henry Headley . . 
John Logan . . . 


359 
359 

360 


Aaron HiU . 


. . 268 


Robert Nugent, Earl 




William Hamiltoi 
William Collins 


1 . 268 
. . 269 


Nugent .... 362 
WiUiam JuUus Mickle 363 


Edward Moore 
John Dyer 


. 270 
. . 271 


Timothy Dwight . . 
Thomas Warton . . 


368 
368 


Allan Ramsay 


. 271 


Thomas Blacklock . 


373 


William Shenston 
Henry Carey . 
Charles Churchill 


e . 277 
. 279 
. 280 


William Hay ward Ro- 
berts 

Sir William Jones . 


375 
376 


Robert Lloyd . 
David IMallet . 


. . 284 
. . 285 


Robert Bums . 
WiUiam Mason . . 


385 

395 


Edward Young 
John Brown . 
Michael Bruce 


. . 2S6 
. 290 
. 290 


Joseph Warton . 
William Cowper . . 
Erasmus Darwin . . 


404 
411 
428 


James Grainger 


. 291 


James Beattie . . 


431 


William Falconer 


. 292 


Christopher Anstey . 


436 



ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. 



PART I. 



The influence of the Norman Conquest upon the language of 
England was like that of a great inundation, which at first buries 
the face of the landscape under its waters, but which, at last sub- 
siding, leaves behind it the elements of new beauty and fertility. 
Its first effect was to degrade the Anglo-Saxon tongue to the 
exclusive use of the inferior orders ; and by the transference of 
estates, ecclesiastical benefices, and civil dignities, to Norman 
possessors, to give the French language, which had begun to 
prevail at court from the time of Edward the Confessor, a more 
complete predominance among the higher classes of society. The 
native gentry of England were either driven into exile, or 
depressed into a state of dependence on their conqueror which 
habituated them to speak his language. On the other hand, we 
received from the Normans the first germs of romantic poetry ; 
and our language was ultimately indebted to them for a wealth 
and compass of expression which it probably would not have 
otherwise possessed. 

The Anglo-Saxon, however, was not lost, though it was super- 
seded by French, and disappeared as the language of superior 
life and of public business. It is found written in prose at the 
end of Stephen's reign, nearly a century after the Conquest ; and 
the * Saxon Chronicle,' which thus exhibits it,* contains even a 

* [As the Saxon Chronicle relates the death of Stephen, it must have 
been written after that event. — Ellis, Early Eng. Poets, vol. i. p. 60, and 
vol. iii. p. 404, ed. 1801. 

What is commonly called the ' Saxon Chronicle' is continued to the death 
of Stephen, in 1154, and in the same language, though with some loss of its 
purity. Besides the neglect of several grammatical rules, French words 
now and then obtrude themselves, but not very frequently, in the latter pages 
of this Chronicle. — Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. i. p. 59.J 



2 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part i. 

fragment of verse, professed to have been composed by an indi- 
vidual who had seen William the Conqueror. To fix upon any 
precise time when the national speech can be said to have ceased 
to be Saxon, and begun to be English, is pronounced by Dr. 
Johnson to be impossible.* It is undoubtedly difficult, if it be 
possible, from the gradually progressive nature of language, as 
well as from the doubt, with regard to dates, which hangs over 
the small number of specimens of the early tongue which we 
possess. Mr. Ellis fixes upon a period of about forty years, pre- 
ceding the accession of Henry III., from 1180 to 1216, during 
which he conceives modern English to have been formed. f The 
opinions of Mr. Ellis, which are always delivered with candour, 
and almost always founded on intelligent views, are not to be 
lightly treated ; and I hope I shall not appear to be either cap- 
tious or inconsiderate in disputing them. But it seems to me 
that he rather arbitrarily defines the number of years which he 
supposes to have elapsed in the formation of our language, when 
he assigns forty years for that formation. He afterwards speaks 
of the vulgar English having suddenly superseded the pure and 
legitimate Saxon. | Now, if the supposed period could be fixed 
with any degree of accuracy to thirty or forty years, one might 
waive the question whether a transmutation occupying so much 

* Introduction to Johnson's Dictionary. [Nor can it be expected, from 
the nature of things gradually changing, that any time can be assigned when 

Saxon may be said to cease, and the English to commence Total 

and sudden transformations of a language seldom happen. 

About the year 1150 the Saxon began to take a form in which the 
beginning of the present English may be plainly discovered : this change 
seems not to have been the effect of the Norman Conquest, for very few 
French words are found to have been introduced in the first hundred years 
after it ; the language must therefore have been altered by causes like those 
which, notwithstanding the care of writers and societies instituted to obviate 
them, are even now daily making innovations in every living language. — 
Johnson.] 

f [It is only justice to Mr. Ellis to give his date correctly, 1185. " We 
may fairly infer," Mr. Ellis writes, " that the Saxon language and literature 
began to be mixed with the Norman about 1185; and that in 1216 the 
change may be considered as complete."] 

I " The most striking peculiarity in the establishment of our vulgar 
English is. that it seems to have very suddenly superseded the pure and 
legitimate Saxon, from which its elements were principally derived, instead 
of becoming its successor, as generally has been supposed, by a slow and 
imperceptible process." — Ellis, Specimens of Early English Foetry, vol. iii. 
p. 404. Conclusion. 



PART I.] FORMATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 3 

time could, with propriety or otliervvise, be called a sudden one ; 
but when we find that there are no sufficient data for fixing its 
boundaries even to fifty years, the idea of a sudden transition in 
the language becomes inadmissible. 

The mixture of our literature and language with the Norman, 
or, in other words, the formation of English, commenced, accord- 
ing to Mr. Ellis, in 1180 [5]. At that period he calculates 
that Layamon, the first translator from French into the native 
tongue, finished his version of Wace's ' Brut.' This translation, 
however, he pronounces to be still unmixed, though barbarous 
Saxon.* It is certainly not very easy to conceive how the 
sudden and distinct formation of English can be said to have 
commenced with unmixed Saxon ; but Mr. Ellis possibly 
meant the period of Layamon's work to be the date after, and 
not at, which the change may be understood to have begun. Yet, 
while he pronounces Layamon's language unmixed Saxon, he 
considers it to be such a sort of Saxon as required but the substi- 
tution of a few French for Saxon words to become English. f 
Nothing more, in Mr. Ellis's opinion, was necessary to change 
the old into the new native tongue, and to produce an exact 
resemblance between the Saxon of the twelfth century and the 
English of the thirteenth ; early in which century, according to 
Mr. Ellis, the new language was fully formed, or, as he after- 
wards more cautiously expresses himself, was " in its far advanced 
state." The reader will please to recollect, that the two main 
circumstances in the change of Anglo-Saxon into English are 
the adoption of French words, and the suppression of the inflec- 

* [Mr. Ellis (p. 73) says, *' very barbarous Saxon." " So little," says 

Sir Walter Scott in his Review of Mr. Ellis's Specimens, " were the Saxon 

and Norman languages calculated to amalgamate, that, though Layamon 

wrote in the reign of Henry II., his language is almost pure Saxon ; and 

j hence it is probable, that, if the mixed language now called English at all 

I existed, it was deemed as yet unfit for composition, and only used as a pie- 

i bald jargon for carrying on the indispensable intercourse betwixt the Anglo- 

i Saxons and Normans. In process of time, however, the" dialect so much 

I despised made its way into the service of the poets, and seems to have 

I superseded the use of the Saxon, although the French, being the court lan- 

j guage, continued to maintain its ground till a later period." — Misc. Fr. 

' Works, vol. xvii. p. 8.] 

I t [It seems reasonable to infer that Layamon's work was composed at 
I or very near the period when the Saxons and Normans in this country began 
to unite into one nation, and to adopt a common language. — Ellis, vol. i. 
p. 75.] 

b2 



4 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part i. 

tions of the Saxon noun and verb. Now, if Layamon's style 
exhibits a language needing only a few French words to be con- 
vertible into English, the Anglo-Saxon must have made some 
progress before Layamon's time to an English form. Whether 
that progress was made gradually or suddenly, we have not suffi- 
cient specimens of the language, anterior to Layamon, to deter- 
mine. But that the change was not sudden, but gradual, I con- 
ceive, is much more probably to be presumed.* 

Layamon, however, whether we call him Saxon or English, 
certainly exhibits a dawn of English. And when did this 
dawn appear? Mr. Ellis computes that it was in 1180 [5], 
placing it thus late because Wace took a great many years to 
translate his ' Brut ' from Geoffrey of Monmouth ; and because 
Layamon, who translated that ' Brut,' was probably twenty-five 
years engaged in the task.f But this is attempting to be precise 

* If Layamon's work was finished in 1180 [1185], the verses in the 'Saxon 
Chronicle,' on the death of William the Conqueror, said to be written by one 
who had seen that monarch, cannot be considered as a specimen of the lan- 
guage immediately anterior to Layamon. But St. Godric is said to have 
died in 1170, and the verses ascribed to him might have been written at a 
time nearly preceding Layamon's work. Of St. Godric's verses a very few 
may be compared with a few of Layamon's. 

ST. GODRIC. 

Sainte Marie Christie's bur ! 
INIaiden's clenhud, Modere's flur ! 
Dillie mine sinnen, rix in mine mod, 
Bring me to winne with selfe God. 

In English. Saint Mary, Christ's bower — Maiden's purity, Motherhood's 
flower — Destroy my sin, reign in my mood (or mind) — Bring me to dwell 
with the very God. 

LAYAMON. 

And of alle than folke 
The wuneden ther on folde, 
Wes thisses loudes folk 
Leodene hendest itald ; 
And alswa the wimmen 
Wunliche on heowen. 

Li English. And of all the folk that dwelt on earth was this land's folk 
the handsomest (people told) : and also the women handsome of hue. 

Here are four lines of St. Godric, in all probability earlier than Laya- 
mon's ; and yet does the English reader find Laynmon at all more intelli- 
gible, or does he seem to make anything like a sudden transition to English 
as the poetical successor of St. Godric ? 

f [Wace finished his translation in 115.5, after, Mr. Ellis supposes, thirty 
yeai-s' labour : Layamon, he assumes, was the same period, finishing it in 
1185 ; " perhaps," he says, " the earliest date that can be assigned to it." — 
Specimens of Earl j English Poetry, vol. i. pp. 75-6. 

" Layamon's 



PART I.] FORMATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 5 

in dates where there is no ground for precision. It is quite as 
easy to suppose that the English translator finished his work in 
ten as in twenty years ; so that the change from Saxon to English 
would commence in 1265 [1165?], and thus the forty years' 
Exodus of our language, supposing it bounded to 1216, would 
extend to half a century. So difficult is it to fix any definite 
period for the commencing formation of English, It is easy to 
speak of a child being born at an express time ; but the birth- 
epochs of languages are not to be registered with the same pre- 
cision and facility.* Again, as to the end of Mr. Ellis's period : 
it is inferred by him that the formation of the language was 
either completed or far advanced in 1216, from the facility of 
rhyming displayed in Robert of Gloucester,*]" and in pieces 
belonging to the middle of the thirteenth century, or perhaps to 
an earlier date. I own that, to me, this theorizing by conjecture 
seems like stepping in quicksand. Robert of Gloucester wrote 
in 1280; J and surely his rhyming with facility then does not 

" Layamon's age," says Mr. Hallam, *' is uncertain ; it naust have been 
after 1155, when the original poem was completed, and can hardly be placed 
below 1200. His language is accounted rather Anglo-Saxon than English." 
Lit. Hist. vol. i. p. 59. Since the former editions of this Es^ay Layamon 
has been printed by the Society of Antiquaries of London, under the able 
superintendence of Sir F. Madden.] 

* [Nothing can be more difficult, except by an arbitrary line, than to de- 
termine the commencement of the English language. When we compare 
the earliest English of the thirteenth century with the Anglo-Saxon of the 
twelfth, it seems hard to pronounce why it should pass for a separate lan- 
guage, rather than a modification or simplification of the former. We must 
conform, however, to usage, and say that the Anglo-Saxon was converted 
into English — 1st, by contracting or otherwise modifying the pronunciation 
and orthography of words ; 2ndly, by omitting many inflections, especially 
of the nouns, and consequently making more use of articles and auxiliaries ; 
Srdly, by the introduction of French derivatives ; 4thly, by using less in- 
version and ellipsis, especially in poetry. Of these, the second alone I think 
can be considered as sufficient to describe a new form of language ; and this 
was brought about so gradually, that we are not relieved from much of 
our difficulty — whether some compositions shall pass for the latest off- 
spring of the mother, or the earliest fruits of the daughter's fertility. It is 
a proof of this difficulty, that the best masters of our ancient language have 
lately introduced the word Semi-Saxon, which is to cover everything from 
1150 to 1250.— Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. i. p. 57.] 

t [Robert of Gloucester, who is placed by the critics in the thirteenth 
century, seems to have used a kind of intermediate diction, neither Saxon nor 
English ; in his work, therefore, we see the transition exhibited. — Johnson.] 

+ [As Robert of Gloucester alludes to the canonisation of St. Louis in 1297, 
it is obvious, however much he wrote before, he was writing after that 
event. See Sir F. Madden's Havelok, p. liii.] 



!■- 



6 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part i. 

prove the English language to have been fully formed in 1216. 
But we have pieces, it seems, which are supposed to have been 
written early in the thirteenth century. To give any support to 
Mr. Ellis's theory, such pieces must be proved to have been pro- 
duced very early in the thirteenth century. Their coming 
towards the middle of it, and showing facility of rhyming at that 
late date, will prove little or nothing. 

But of these poetical fragments supposed to commence either 
with or early in the thirteenth century, our antiquaries afford us 
dates which, though often confidently pronounced, are really 
only conjectural ; and in fixing those conjectural dates, they are 
by no means agreed. Warton speaks of this and that article 
being certainly not later than the reign of Richard 1. ; but he 
takes no pains to authenticate what he affirms. He pronounces 
the love-song, ' Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow !' to be 
as old as the year 1200.* Mr. Ellis puts it off only to about 
half a century later. Hickes places the ' Land of Cokayne ' 
just after the Conquest. Mr. Warton would place it before the 
Conquest, if he were not deterred by the appearance of a few 
Norman words, and by the learned authority of Hickes. t Laya- 
mon would thus be superseded, as quite a modern. The truth 
is, respecting the ' Land of Cokayne,' that we are left in total 
astonishment at the circumstance of men, so well informed as 
Hickes and Warton, placing it either before or immediately after 
the Conquest, as its language is comparatively modern. It con- 
tains allusions to pinnacles in buildings, which were not intro- 
duced till the reign of Henry III.J Mr. Ellis is not so rash as 
to place that production, which Hickes and Warton removed to 
near the Conquest, earlier than the thirteenth century ; and I 

* [Warton says, '* before or about," which is lax enough. — Price's Warton, 
vol. i. p. 28, ed. 1824.] 

f [It is not of the ' Land of Cokayne' that Warton says this, but of a 
religious or moral ode, consisting of one hundred and ninety-one stanzas. — 
Price's Warton, vol. i. p. 7. Of the ' Land of Cokayne ' he has said that it 
IS a satire, which clearly exemplifies the Saxon adulterated by the Norman, 
and was evidently written soon after the Conquest, at least soon after the 
reign of Henry II. — p. 9. Mr. Price (p. 7) follows Mr. Campbell in the age 
he would attach to the verse quoted in the first section of Warton, which is, 
he says, very arbitrary and uncertain.] 

I [So says Gray to Mason ( Works by Mitford, vol. iii. p. 305) ; but this 
is endeavouring to settle a point by a questionable date — one uncertainty by 
another.] 



PART 1.] FORMATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 7 

believe it may be placed even late in that century. In short, 
where shall we fix upon the first poem that is decidedly English ? 
and how shall we ascertain its date to a certainty within any 
moderate number of years ? Instead of supposing the period of 
the formation of English to commence at 1180 [1185?], and to 
end at 1216, we might, without violence to any known fact, ex- 
tend it back to several years earlier, and bring it down to a great 
many years later. In the fair idea of English, we surely, in 
general, understand a considerable mixture of French words.* 
Now, whatever may have been done in the twelfth century, with 
regard to that change from Saxon to English which consists in 
the extinction of Saxon grammatical inflections, it is plain that 
the other characteristic of English, viz. its Gallicism, was only 
beginning in the thirteenth century. The English language 
could not be said to be saturated with French till the days of 
Chaucer, i. e. it did not, till his time, receive all the French 
words which it was capable of retaining. Mr. Ellis nevertheless 
tells us that the vulgar English, not gradually, but suddenly, 
superseded the legitimate Saxon. When this sudden succession 
precisely began, it seems to be as difficult to ascertain, as when 
it ended. The sudden transition, by Mr. Ellis's own theory, 
occupied about forty years ; and, to all appearance, that term 
might be lengthened, with respect to its commencement and 
continuance, to fourscore years at least. 

The Saxon language, we are told, had ceased to be poetically 
cultivated for some time previous to the Conquest. This might 
be the case with regard to lofty eflTorts of composition ; but In- 
gulphus, the secretary of William the Conqueror, speaks of the 
popular ballads of the English, in praise of their heroes, which 
were sung about the streets ; and William of Malmsbury, in the 
twelfth century, continues to make mention of them.f The pre- 
tensions of these ballads to the name of poetry we are unhappily, 
from the loss of them, unable to estimate. For a long time after 
the Conquest, the native minstrelsy, though it probably was never 

* [In comparing Eobert of Gloucester with Layamon, a native of the same 
county, and a writer on the same subject, it -will appear that a great quantity 
of French had flowed into the language since the loss of Normandy. — 
Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. i. p. 61.] 

t William of Malmsbury drew much of his information from those Saxon 
ballads. 



8 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part i. 

altogether extinct, may be supposed to have sunk to the lowest 
ebb. No human pursuit is more sensible than poetry to national 
pride or mortification ; and a race of peasants, like the Saxons, 
struggling for bare subsistence, under all the dependence, and 
without the protection, of the feudal system, were in a state the 
most ungenial to feelings of poetical enthusiasm. For more than 
one century after the Conquest, as we are informed, an English- 
man was a term of contempt. So much has time altered the 
associations attached to a name, which we should now employ as 
the first appeal to the pride or intrepidity of those who bear it. 
By degrees, however, the Norman and native races began to 
coalesce, and their patriotism and political interests to be identi- 
fied. The crown and aristocracy having become during their 
struggles, to a certain degree, candidates for the favour of the 
people, and rivals in affording them protection, free burghs and 
chartered corporations were increased, and commerce and social 
intercourse began to quicken. Mr. Ellis alludes to an Anglo- 
Norman jargon having been spoken in commercial intercourse, 
from which he conceives our synonymes to have been derived. 
That individuals, imperfectly understanding each other, might 
accidentally speak a broken jargon, may be easily conceived ; 
but that such a lingua Franca was ever the distinct dialect, even 
of a mercantile class, Mr. Ellis proves neither by specimens nor 
historical evidence. The synonymes in our language may cer- 
tainly be accounted for by the gradual entrance of French words, 
^vithout supposing an intermediate jargon. The national speech, 
it is true, received a vast influx of French words ; but it received 
tliem by degrees, and subdued them, as they came in, to its own 
idioms and grammar. 

Yet, diflficult as it may be to pronounce precisely when Saxon 
can be said to have ceased and English to have begun, it must 
be supposed that the progress and improvement of the national 
speech was most considerable at those epochs which tended to 
restore the importance of the people. The hypothesis of a 
sudden transmutation of Saxon into English appears, on the 
whole, not to be distinctly made out. At the same time, some 
public events might be highly favourable to the progress and 
cultivation of the language. Of those events, the establishment 
of municipal governments and of elective magistrates in the 



PART I.] FORMATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 9 

towns must have been very important, as they furnished mate- 
rials and incentives for daily discussion and popular eloquence. 
As property and security increased among the people, we may 
also suppose the native minstrelsy to have revived. The min- 
strels, or those who wrote for them, translated or imitated 
Norman romances ; and, in so doing, enriched the language with 
many new words, which they borrowed from the originals, either 
from want of corresponding terms in their own vocabulary, or 
from the words appearing to be more agreeable. Thus, in a 
general view, we may say that, amidst the early growth of her 
commerce, literature, and civilization, England acquired the 
new form of her language, which was destined to carry to the 
ends of the earth the blessings from which it sprang. 

In the formation of English from its Saxon and Norman ma- 
terials, the genius of the native tongue might be said to prevail, 
as it subdued to Saxon grammar and construction the numerous 
French words which found their way into the language.* But 
it was otherwise with respect to our poetry — in which, after the 
Conquest, the Norman Muse must be regarded as the earliest 
preceptress of our own. Mr. Tyrwhitt has even said, and his 
opinion seems to be generally adopted, that we are indebted for 
the use of rhyme, and for all the forms of our versification, 
entirely to the Normans. f Whatever might be the case with 

* Vide Tyrwhitt's Preface to the * Canterbury Tales,' where a distinct 
account is given of the grammatical changes exhibited in the rise and pro- 
gress of English. 

t It is likely that the Normans would have taught us the use of rhyme 
and their own metres, whether these had been known or not to the Anglo- 
Saxons before the Conquest. But respecting Mr. Tyrwhitt's position that 
we owe all our forms of verse and the use of rhyme entirely to the Nor- 
mans, I trust the reader will pardon me for introducing a mere doubt on a 
subject which cannot be interesting to many. With respect to rhyme, I 
might lay some stress on the authority of Mr. Turner, who, in his ' History 
of the Anglo-Saxons,' says that the Anglo-Saxon versification possessed 
occasional rhyme ; but as he admits that rhyme formed no part of its con- 
stituent character, for fear of assuming too much, let it be admitted that we 
have no extant specimens of rhyme in our language before the Conquest. 
One stanza of a ballad shall indeed be mentioned, as an exception to this, 
which may be admitted or rejected at the reader's pleasure. In the mean 
time let it be recollected, that, if we have not rhyme in the vernacular verse, 
we have examples of it in the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon churchmen — abun- 
dance of it in Bede's and Boniface's Latin verses. We meet also, in the 
same writers, with lines which resemble modern verse in their trochaic and 



10 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [parti. 

regard to our forms of versification, the chief employment of our 
earliest versifiers certainly was to transplant the fictions of the 
Norman school, and to naturalise them in our language. 

iambic structure, considering that structure not as classical but accentual 
metre. Take, for example, these verses : — 

" Quando Christus Deus noster 
Natus est ex Virgine — " 

which go precisely in the same cadence with such modern trochaics as 

" Would you bear how once repining 
Great Eliza captive lay." 

And we have many such lines as these : — 

•' Ut floreas cum domino 
In sempiterno solio 
Qua Martyres in cuneo," &c. — 

which flow exactly like the lines in ' L' Allegro i' — 

" The mountain nymph, sweet Libertv. 
* * * * * ' 

And pomp, and feast, and revelry, 
With masque, and antique pageantry. " 

Those Latin lines are, in fact, a prototype of our own eight syllable iambic. 
It is singular that rhyme and such metres as the above, which are generally 
supposed to have come into the other modern languages from the Latin 
rhymes of the church, should not have found their way from thence into the 
Anglo-Saxon vernacular verse. But they certainly did not, we shall be told ; 
for there is no appearance of them in the specimens of Anglo-Saxon verse 
before the Conquest. Of such specimens, however, it is not pretended that 
we have anything like a full or regular series. On the contiary, many 
Saxon ballads, which have been alluded to by Anglo-NorraallUrriters as of 
considerable antiquity, have been lost with the very names of their com- 
posers. And from a few articles saved in such a wreck, can we pronounce 
confidently on the whole contents of the cargo ? The following solitary 
stanza, however, has been preserved, from a ballad attributed to Canute the 
Great : — 

" Merry sungen the Muneches binnen Ely, 

The Cnut Ching reiither by, 

Roweth Cnites noer the land. 

And here we thes Muniches sang." 
" Merry sang the Monks in Ely, 

When Canute King was sailing by : 

Row, ye knights, near the land, 

And let us hear these Monks' song." 

There is something very like rhyme in the Anglo-Saxon stanza. I have 
no doubt that Canute heard the monks singing Latin rhymes ; and I have 
some suspicion that he finished his Saxon ballad in rhyme also. Thomas of 
Ely, who knew the whole song, translates his specimen of it in Latin lines, 
which, whether by accident or design, rhyme to each other. The genius of 



PART I.] FORMATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 11 

The most liberal patronage was afforded to Norman min- 
strelsy in England by the first kings of the new dynasty. This 
encouragement, and the consequent cultivation of the northern 
dialect of French, gave it so much the superiority over the 
southern or troubadour dialect, that the French language, ac- 
cording to the acknowledgment of its b'est informed antiquaries, 
received from England and Normandy the first of its works 
which deserve to be cited. The Norman trouveurs, it is allowed, 
were more eminent narrative poets than the Proven9al trouba- 
dours. No people had a better right to be the founders of chi- 
valrous poetry than the Normans. They were the most energetic 
generation of modern men. Their leader, by the conquest of 
England in the eleventh century, consolidated the feudal system 
upon a broader basis than it ever had before possessed. Before 
the end of the same century, chivalry rose to its full growth as 
an institution, by the circumstance of martial zeal being enlisted 
under the banners of superstition. The crusades, though they 
certainly did not give birth to jousts and tournaments, must have 
imparted to them a new spirit and interest, as the preparatory 
images of a consecrated warfare. And those spectacles con- 
stituted a source of description to the romancers, to which no 
exact counterpart is to be found in the heroic poetry of antiquity. 
But the growth of what may properly be called romantic poetry 
was not instantaneous after the Conquest ; and it was not till 
" English Richard ploughed the deep " that the crusaders seem 
to have found a place among the heroes of romance. Till the 
middle of the twelfth century, or possibly later, no work of pro- 
fessed fiction, or bearing any semblance to epic fable, can be 
traced in Norman verse — nothing but songs, satires, chronicles, 
or didactic works, to all of which, however, the name of Ro- 

the ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry, Mr. Turner observes, was obscure, peri- 
phrastical, and elliptical ; but, according to that writer's conjecture, a new 
and humble but perspicuous style of poetry was introduced at a later time 
in the shape of the narrative ballad. In this plainer style we may conceive 
the possibility of rhyme having found a place ; because the verse would 
stand in need of that ornament to distinguish it from prose, more than in the 
elliptical and inverted manner. With regard to our anapaestic measure, or 
triple-time verse, Dr. Percy has shown that its rudiments can be traced to 
Scaldic poetry. It is often found very distinct in Langlande ; and that 
species of verse, at least, I conceive, is not necessarily to be referred to a 
Norman origin. 



12 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part i. 

mance, derived from the Roman descent of the French tongue, 
was applied in the early and wide acceptation of the word. To 
these succeeded the genuine metrical romance, which, though 
often rhapsodical and desultory, had still invention, ingenuity, 
and design, sufficient to distinguish it from the dry and dreary 
chronicle. The reign of French metrical romance may be 
chiefly assigned to the latter part of the twelfth, and the whole 
of the thirteenth century ; that of English metrical romance to 
the latter part of the thirteenth, and the whole of the fourteenth* 
century. Those ages of chivalrous song were, in the mean time, 
fraught with events which, while they undermined the feudal 
system, gradually prepared the way for the decline of chivalry 
itself. Literature and science were commencing, and even in 
the improvement of the mechanical skill employed to heighten 
chivalrous or superstitious magnificence, the seeds of arts, in- 
dustry, and plebeian independence were unconsciously sown. 
One invention, that of gunpowder, is eminently marked out as 
the cause of the extinction of chivalry ; but even if that inven- 
tion had not taken place, it may well be conjectured that the 
contrivance of other means of missile destruction in war, and the 
improvement of tactics, would have narrowed that scope for the 
prominence of individual prowess which was necessary for the 
chivalrous character, and that the progress of civilisation must 
have ultimately levelled its romantic consequence. But to an- 
ticipate the remote effects of such causes, if scarcely within the 
ken of philosophy, was still less within the reach of poetry. 
Chivalry was still in all its glory, and to the eye of the poet 
appeared as likely as ever to be immortal. The progress of 
civilisation even ministered to its external importance. The 
early arts made chivalrous life, with all its pomp and ceremonies, 
more august and imposing, and more picturesque as a subject for 
description. Literature, for a time, contributed to the same 
effect, by her jejune and fabulous efforts at history, in which the 
athletic worthies of classical story and of modern romance were 
gravely connected by an ideal genealogy.j Thus the dawn of 

* The practice of translating French rhyming romances into English 
verse, however, continued down to the reign of Henry VII. 

f Geoffrey of Monmouth's History, of -which the modern opinion seems to 
be, that it was not a forgery, but derived from an Armorican original, and 



PART I.] FORMATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 13 

human improvement smiled on the fabric which it was ultimately 
to destroy, as the morning sun gilds and beautifies those masses 
of frost-work which are to melt before its noonday heat. 

The elements of romantic fiction have been traced up to 
various sources ; but neither the Scaldic, nor Saracenic, nor 
Armorican theory of its origin can sufficiently account for all 
its materials. Many of them are classical, and others derived 
from the Scriptures. The migrations of Science are difficult 
enough to be traced ; but Fiction travels on still lighter wings, 
and scatters the seeds of her wild flowers imperceptibly over the 
world, till they surprise us by springing up with similarity in 
regions the most remotely divided.* There was a vague and 
unselecting love of the marvellous in romance, which sought for 
adventures, like its knights errant, in every quarter where they 
could be found ; so that it is easier to admit of all the sources 
which are imputed to that species of fiction, than to limit our 
belief to any one of thera.f 

the pseudo-Turpin's ' TJfe of Charlemagne^'' were the grand historical maga- 
zines of the romancers. — Ellis's Met. Rom., vol. i. p. 75. Popular songs 
about Arthur and Charlemagne (or, as some will have it Charles Martel) 
were probably the main sources of Turpin's forgery and of Geoffrey's 
Armorican book. Even the proverbial mendacity of the pseudo-Turpin 
must have been indebted for the leading hints to songs that were extant 
respecting Charlemagne. The stream of fiction, having thus spread itself in 
those grand prose reservoirs, afterwards flowed out from thence again in the 
shape of verse, with a force renewed by accumulation. Once more, as if 
destined to alternations, romance, after the fourteenth century, returned to 
the shape of prose, and in many instances made and carried pretensions to 
the sober credibility of history. 

* [It is common fairness to Mr. Campbell to say that the late Mr. Price 
has cited this passage as one distinguishable alike for its truth and its 
beauty, — that establishes the fact that popular fiction is in its nature tradi- 
tive. — Introd. to Warto7i's Hist., p. 92.] 

t [Various theories have been proposed for the purpose of explaining the 
origin of romantic fiction. Percy contended for a Scandinavian, Warton for 
an Arabian, and Leyden for an Armorican birth, to which Ellis inclined ; 
while some have supposed it to be of Proven9al, and others of Norman in- 
vention. If every argument has not been exhausted, every hypothesis has. 
But all their systems, as Sir Walter Scott says, seem to be inaccurate, in so 
far as they have been adopted exclusively of each other, and of the general 
proposition — that fables of a nature similar to the Romances of chivalry, 
modified according to manners and the state of society, must necessarily be 
invented in every part of the world, for the same reason that grass grows 
upon the surface of the soil in every climate and in every country. — Misc. 
P. W. vol. vi. p. 174. " In reality," says Southey, " mythological and 
romantic tales are current among all savages of whom we have any full 



14 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part i. 

Norman verse dwelt for a considerable time in the tedious his- 
toric style, before it reached the shape of amusing fable ; and 
we find the earliest efforts of the Native Muse confined to trans- 
lating Norman verse, while it still retained its uninviting form 
of the chronicle. The first of the Norman poets, from whom 
any versifier in the language is known to have translated, was 
Wace, a native of Jersey, born in the reign of Henry II.* In 
the year 1155 Wace finished his ' Brut d'Angleterre,' which is 
a French version of Geoffrey of Monmouth's ' History of Great 
Britain,' deduced from Brutus to Cadwallader, in 689. Laya- 
mon, a priest of Ernleye-upon-Severn, translated Wace's ' Me- 
trical Chronicle ' into the verse of the popular tongue ; and, 
notwithstanding Mr. Ellis's date of 1180 [1185 ?], may be sup- 
posed, with equal probability, to have produced his work within 
ten or fifteen years after the middle of the twelfth century. 
Layamon's translation may be considered as the earliest speci- 
men of metre in the native language posterior to the Conquest ; 
except some lines in the ' Saxon Chronicle ' on the death of 
William I., and a few religious rhymes, which, according to 
Matthew Paris, the Blessed Virgin was pleased to dictate to St. 
Godric, the hermit, near Durham ; unless we add to these the 
specimen of Saxon poetry published in the ^ Archaeologia ' by 
Mr. Conybeare, who supposes that composition to be posterior 
to the Conquest, and to be the last expiring voice of the Saxon 
Muse.f Of the dialect of Layamon, Mr. Mitford, in his ' Har- 
mony of Languages,' observes that it has " all the appearance 
of a language thrown into confusion by the circumstances of 

account ; for man has his intellectual as well as his bodily appetites, and 
these things are the food of his imagination and faith. They are found 
wherever there is language and discourse of reason, — in other words, wher- 
ever there is man. And in similar stages of civilisation, or states of society, 
the fictions of different people will bear a correspoudiag resemblance, 
notwithstanding the difference of time and scene." — Pref. to Mort§ 
d' Arthur.'] 

* [Ellis (p. 44) says Henry I., whom he professes to have seen. Warton 
(p. 67) says he was educated at Caen, was canon of Bayeux, and chaplain to 
Henry IL] , 

t Two specimens of the ancient state of the language — viz. the stanzas on 
Old Age, beginning " He may him sore adreden," and the quotation from the 
Ormulum, which Dr. Johnson placed, on the authority of Hickes, nearly 
after the Conquest — are considered by Mr. Tyrwhitt to be of a later date than 
Layamon's translation. Their language is certainly more modern. 



PARTI.] TWELFTH AND THIETEENTH CENTURIES. 15 



those who spoke it. It is truly neither Saxon nor English."* 
Mr. Ellis's opinion of its being simple Saxon has been already 
noticed. So little agreed are the most ingenious speculative 
men on the characteristics of style which they shall entitle Saxon 
or English. We may, however, on the whole, consider the 
style of Layamon to be as nearly the intermediate state of 
the old and new languages as can be found in any ancient spe- 
cimen : — something like the new insect stirring its wings before 
it has shaken off the aurelia state. But of this work, or of any 
specimen supposed to be written in the early part of the thir- 
teenth century, displaying a sudden transition from Saxon to 
English, I am disposed to repeat my doubts. 

Without being over credulous about the antiquity of the 
* Lives of the Saints,' and the other fragments of the thirteenth 
century, which Mr. Ellis places in chronological succession 
next to Layamon, we may allow that before the date of Eobert 
of Gloucester, not only the legendary and devout style, but the 
amatory and satirical, had begun to be rudely cultivated in the 
language. It was customary in that age to make the minstrels 
sing devotional strains to the harp on Sundays, for the edifi- 
cation of the people, instead of the verses on gayer subjects 
which were sung at public entertainments ; a circumstance 
which, while it indicates the usual care of the Catholic church 
to make use of every hold over the popular mind, discovers 
also the fondness of the people for their poetry, and the attrac- 
tions which it had already begun to assume. Of the satirical 
style I have already alluded to one example in the ' Land of 
Cokayne,' an allegorical satire on the luxury of the church, 
couched under the description of an imaginary paradise, in which 
the nuns are represented as houris, and the black and grey monks 
as their paramours. This piece has humour, though not of the 
most delicate kind, and the language is easy and fluent, but it 

* [Mitford, p. 170. In the Specimen of Layamon, published by Mr. 
Ellis, not a Gallicism is to be found, nor even a Norman term : and so far 
from exhibiting any " appearance of a language thrown into confusion by 
the circumstances of those "who spoke it," nearly every important form of 
Anglo-Saxon grammar is rigidly adhered to ; and so little was the language 
altered at this advanced period of Norman influence, that a few slight varia- 
tions might convert it into genuine Anglo-Saxon. — Price, Warton, vol. i. 
p. 109.] 



16 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part i. 

possesses nothing of style, sentiment, or imagery, approaching 
to poetry. Another specimen of the pleasantry of the times is 
more valuable, because it exhibits the state of party feeling on 
real events, as well as the state of language at a precise time.* 
It is a ballad, entitled ' Richard of Alemaigne,' composed by 
one of the adherents of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, 
after the defeat of the royal party at the battle of Lewes in 1264. 
In the year after that battle the royal cause was restored, and 
the earl of Warren and Sir Hugh Bigod returned from exile, 
and assisted in the king's victory. In this satirical ballad those 
two personages are threatened with death if they should ever 
fall into the hands of their enemies. Such a song and such 
threats must have been composed by Leicester's party in the 
moment of their triumph, and not after their defeat and dis- 
persion ; so that the date of the piece is ascertained by its con- 
tents. + This political satire leads me to mention another, which 
the industrious Ritson published,^ and which, without violent 
anachronism, may be spoken of among the specimens of the 
thirteenth century, as it must have been composed within a few 
years after its close, and relates to events within its verge. It 
is a ballad on the execution of the Scottish patriots. Sir 
William Wallace and Sir Simon Fraser. The diction is as bar- 
barous as we should expect from a song of triumph on such a 
subject. It relates the death and treatment of Wallace very 
minutely. The circumstance of his being covered with a mock 
crown of laurel in Westminster Hall, which Stowe repeats, is 
there mentioned ; and that of his legs being fastened with iron 
fetters " under his horses ivomhe " is told with savage exul- 
tation. The piece was probably endited in the very year of 
the political murders which it celebrates; certainly before 1314, 
as it mentions the skulking of Robert Bruce, which, after the 
battle of Bannockburn, must have become a jest out of season.§ 

* " Though some make slight of libels," says Selden, " yet you may see 
by them ho-sr the wind sits ; as, take a stravr, and throw it up into the air, 
you shall see by that which way the wind is, which you shall not do by 
casting up a stone. More solid things do not show the complexion of the 
times so well as ballads and libels." — Table Talk. 

t [See it in Percy's ' Reliques,' and in Wright's ' Political Songs of Eng- 
land,' p. 69.] 

X Ritson's ' Ancient Songs.' 

§ [Wright assigns it to 1306.— Political Songs, p. 212.] 



PART I.] THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 17 

A few love-songs of that early period have been preserved, 
which are not wholly destitute of beauty and feeling. Their ex- 
pression, indeed, is often quaint, and loaded with alliteration ; 
yet it is impossible to look without a pleasing interest upon strains 
of tenderness which carry us back to so remote an age, and which 
disclose to us the softest emotions of the human mind in times 
abounding with such opposite traits of historical recollection. 
Such a stanza as the following* would not disgrace the lyric 
poetry of a refined age. 

For her love I cark and care, 
For her love I droop and dare ; 
For her love my bliss is bare, 

And all I wax wan. 
For her love in sleep I slake, f 
For her love all night I wake ; 
For her love mourning I make 

More than any man. 

In another pastoral strain the lover says, — 

When the nightingale singes the woods waxen green ; 
Leaf, and grass, and blosme, springs in Averyl, I ween : 
And love is to my heart gone with one spear so keen, 
Night and day my blood it drinks— my heart doth me teen. 

Robert, a monk of Gloucester, whose surname is unknown, is 
supposed to have finished his ' Rhyming Chronicle ' about the 
year 1280. J He translated the Legends of Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth, and continued the History of England down to the time 
of Edward L, in the beginning of whose reign he died. The 
topographical, as well as narrative, minuteness of his ' Clironicle' 
has made it a valuable authority to antiquaries ; and as such it 
was consulted by Selden, when he wrote his Notes to Drayton's 
* Polyolbion.' After observing some traits of humour and sen- 
timent, moderate as they may be, in compositions as old as the 
middle of the thirteenth century, we might naturally expect to 
find in Robert of Gloucester not indeed a decidedly poetical 

* It is here stripped of its antiquated spelling- f I am deprived of sleep. 

X [Ellis, vol. i. p. 97. It was evidently written after the year 1278, as 
the poet mentions King Arthur's sumptuous tomb, erected in that year 
before the high altar of Glastonbury church ; and he declares himself a 
living witness of the remarkably dismal weather which distinguished the 
day upon which the battle of Evesham was fought, in 12C5. From these 
and other circumstances this piece appears to have been composed about the 
year 1280.— Warton, vol. i. p. 52.] 

C 



18 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part i. 

manner, but some approach to the animation of poetry. But 
the ' Chronicle ' of this English Ennius, as he has been called,* 
whatever progress in the state of the language it may display, 
comes in reality nothing nearer the character of a work of imagi- 
nation than Layamon's version of Wace, which preceded it by a 
hundred years. One would not imagine, from Robert of 
Gloucester's style, that he belonged to a period when a single 
effusion of sentiment, or a trait of humour and vivacity, had 
appeared in the language. On the contrary, he seems to take us 
back to the nonage of poetry, when verse is employed not to 
harmonise and beautify expression, but merely to assist the 
memory. Were we to judge of Robert of Gloucester not as a 
chronicler but as a candidate for the honours of fancy, we might 
be tempted to wonder at the frigidity with which he dwells, as 
the first possessor of such poetical ground, on the history of 
Lear, of Arthur, and Merlin ; and with which he describes a 
scene so susceptible of poetical effect as the irruption of the first 
crusaders into Asia, preceded by the sword of fire which hung 
in the firmament, and guided them eastward in their path. But, 
in justice to the ancient versifier, we should remember, that he 
had still only a rude language to employ — the speech of boors 
and burghers, which, though it might possess a few songs and 
satires, could afford him no models of heroic narration. In such 
an age, the first occupant passes uninspired over subjects which 
might kindle the highest enthusiasm in the poet of a riper period ; 
as the savage treads unconsciously, in his deserts, over mines of 
incalculable value, without sagacity to discover, or implements 
to explore them. In reality, his object was but to be historical. 
The higher orders of society still made use of French; and 
scholars wrote in that language or in Latin. His ' Chronicle' was 
therefore recited to a class of his contemporaries to whom it 
must have been highly acceptable, as a history of their native 
country believed to be authentic, and composed in their native 
tongue. To the fabulous legends of antiquity he added a record 
of more recent events, with some of which he was contemporary. 
As a relater of events, he is tolerably succinct and perspicuous ; 
and wherever the fact is of any importance, he shows a watchful 
attention to keep the reader's memory distinct with regard to 
* [By Tom Hearne, his very accurate editor.] 



PART 1.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 19 

chronology, by making the date of the year rhyme to something 
prominent in the narration of the fact. 

Our first known versifier of the fourteenth century is Robert, 
commonly called De Brunne. He was born (according to his 
editor, Hearne) at Malton, in Yorkshire ; lived for some time in 
the house of Sixhill, a Gilbertine monastery in Yorkshire ; and 
afterwards became a member of Brunne or Browne, a priory of 
black canons in the same county. His real surname was Man- 
nyng ; but the writers of history in those times (as Hearne ob- 
serves) were generally the religious, and when they became 
celebrated they were designated by the names of the religious 
houses to which they belonged. Thus, William of Malmsbury, 
Matthew of Westminster, and John of Glastonbury, received 
those appellations from their respective monasteries.* De Brunne 
was, as far as we know, only a translator. His principal per- 
formance is a Rhyming Chronicle of the History of England, in 
two parts, compiled from the works of Wace and Peter de Lang- 
toft, f The declared object of his work is '' not for the lerid 
(learned) but for the lewed (the low). 

** For tho* that in this land wonn,^ 
That the latyn no'' Frankys"* conn."« 

He seems to reckon, however, if not on the attention of the 
" lerid," at least on that of a class above the " lewed," as he 
begins his address to " Lordynges that be now here." He de- 
clares also that his verse was constructed simply, being intended 
neither for seggers (reciters) nor harpours (harpers). Yet it is 
clear, from another passage, that he intended his ' Chronicle ' to 
be sung, at least by parts, at public festivals. In the present day 
it would require considerable vocal powers to make so dry a 
recital of facts as that of De Brunne's work entertaining to an 
audience ; but it appears that he could offer one of the most 

* [Sir F, Madden supposes, and on very fair grounds, that Manuyng was 
born at Brunne. — Havelok, p. xiv.] 

t Peter de Langtoft was an Augustine canon of Bridlington, in Yorkshire, 
of Norman origin, but born in England. He wrote an entire ' History of 
England ' in French rhymes, down to the end of the reign of Edward I. — 
Robert de Brunne, in his 'Chronicle,' followers Wace in the earlier part of 
his History, but translates the latter part of it from Langtoft. 

* Those. ^ Live. <= Nor. ^ French. ^ Know. 

c2 



20 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETEY. [part i. 

ancient apologies of authorship, namely, " the request of friends" 
— for he says, 

" Men besoght me many a time 
To torn it bot in light rhyme." 

His * Chronicle,' it seems, was likely to be an acceptable work to 
social parties, assembled 

" For to haf solace and gamen* 
In fellawship when they sit samen."^ 

In rude states of society verse is attached to many subjects 
from which it is afterwards divorced by the progress of litera- 
ture ; and primitive poetry is found to be the organ not only of 
history, but of science,* theology, and of law itself. The an- 
cient laws of the Athenians were sung at their public banquets. 
Even in modern times, and within the last century, the laws of 
Sweden were published in verse. 

De Brunne*s versification, throughout the body of the work, 
is sometimes the entire Alexandrine, rhyming in couplets ; but 
for the most part it is only the half Alexandrine, with alternate 
rhymes. He thus affords a ballad metre, which seems to justify 
the conjecture of Hearne, that our most ancient ballads were 
only fragments of metrical histories, t By this time (for the date 
of De Brunne's ^ Chronicle ' brings us down to the year 1339)| 
our popular ballads must have long added the redoubted names 
of Randal [earl] of Chester, and Robin Hood, to their list of 
native subjects. Both of these worthies had died before the 
middle of the preceding century, and, in the course of the next 
hundred years, their names became so popular in English song, 

^ Game. ^ Together. 

* Virgil, -when he carries us back to very ancient manners, in the picture 
of Dido's feast, appropriately makes astronomy the first subject with which 
the bard lopas entertains his audience. 

Cithara crinitus lopas 
Personat aurata, docuit quae maximus Atlas ; 
Hie canit errantem lunam, solisque labores. 

JEneid I. 

t ["The conjectures of Hearne," says Warton (vol. i. p. 91), "were 
generally wrong." An opinion re-echoed in part by Ellis. — Spec. vol. i. 
p. 117.J 

X Robert de Brunne, it appears, from internal evidence, finished his 
' Chronicle' in May of that year. — Eitson's 3Iinot. XIII. [He began it in 
1303, as he tells us himself in very ordinary verse.] 



PART I.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 21 

that Langlande, in the fourteenth century, makes it part of the 
confession of a sluggard, that he was unable to repeat his pater- 
noster, though he knew plenty of rhymes about Randal of Chester 
and Robin Hood.* None of the extant ballads about Robin 
Hood are however of any great antiquity. 

The style of Robert de Brunne is less marked by Sax- 
onisms than that of Robert of Gloucester ; and though he 
can scarcely be said to come nearer the character of a true poet 
than his predecessor, he is certainly a smoother versifier, and 
evinces more facility in rhyming. It is amusing to find his 
editor, Hearne, so anxious to defend the moral memory of a 
writer, respecting whom not a circumstance is known beyond 
the date of his works and the names of the monasteries 
where he wore his cowl. From his willingness to favour the 
people with historic rhymes for their '*' fellawship and gamen," 
Hearne infers that he must have been of a jocular temper. It 
seems, however, that the priory of Sixhill, where he lived for 
some time, was a house which consisted of women as well as 
men, a discovery which alarms the good antiquary for the fame 
of his author's personal purity. " Can we therefore think," 
continues Hearne, " that, since he was of a jocular temper, he 
could be wholly free from vice, or that he should not sometimes 
express himself loosely to the sisters of that place ? This objec- 
tion" (he gravely continues) " would have had some weight, had 
the priory of Sixhill been any way noted for luxury or lewdness ; 
but whereas every member of it, both men and women, were 
very chaste, we ought by no means to suppose that Robert of 
Brunne behaved himself otherwise than became a good Chris- 
tian during his whole abode there." This conclusive reasoning, 
it may be hoped, will entirely set at rest any idle suspicions that 
may have crept into the reader's mind respecting the chastity of 
Robert de Brunne. It may be added, that his writings betray 
not the least symptom of his having been either an Abelard 
among priests, or an Ovid among poets. 

Considerably before the date of Robert de Brunne's ' Chronicle,' 
as we learn from De Brunne himself, the English minstrels, or 
those who wrote for them, had imitated from the French many 

* [Pierce Plowman's Visions, as quoted by Warton (vol. i. p. 92). Lang* 
lande tells it of a friar, perhaps with truthful severity.] 



22 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part i. 

compositions more poetical than those historical canticles, namely, 
genuine romances. In most of those metrical stories, irregular 
and shapeless as they were, if we compare them with the sym- 
metrical structure of epic fable, there was still some portion of 
interest, and a catastrophe brought about, after various obstacles 
and difficulties, by an agreeable surprise. The names of the 
writers of our early English romances have not, except in one 
or two instances, been even conjectured, nor have the dates of 
the majority of them been ascertained with anything like pre- 
cision. But in a general view, the era of English metrical 
romance may be said to have commenced towards the end of the 
thirteenth century. Warton, indeed, would place the commence- 
ment of our romance poetry considerably earlier; but Ritson 
challenges a proof of any English romance being known or 
mentioned, before the close of Edward I.'s reign, about 
which time, that is, the end of the thirteenth century, he conjec- 
tures that the romance of ' Hornchild ' may have been composed. 
It would be pleasing, if it were possible, to extend the claims of 
English genius in this department to any considerable number 
of original pieces. But English romance poetry, having grown 
out of that of France, seems never to have improved upon its 
original, or, rather, it may be allowed to have fallen beneath it. 
As to the originality of old English poems of this kind, we 
meet, in some of them, with heroes whose Saxon names might 
lead us to suppose them indigenous fictions, which had not come 
into the language through a French medium. Several old Saxon 
ballads are alluded to, as extant long after the Conquest, by the 
Anglo-Norman historians, who drew from them many facts and 
inferences ; and there is no sajang how many of these ballads 
might be recast into a romantic shape by the composers for the 
native minstrelsy. But, on the other hand, the Anglo-Xormans 
appear to have been more inquisitive into Saxon legends than 
the Saxons themselves ; and their Muse was by no means so 
illiberal as to object to a hero because he was not of their own 
generation. In point of fact, whatever may be alleged about 
the minstrels of the North Country, it is difficult, if it be pos- 
sible, to find an English romance which contains no internal 
allusion to a French prototype. Ritson very grudgingly allows 
that three old stories may be called original English romances, 



' PABT I.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 23 

i until a Norman original shall be found for them ;* while Mr. 
Tyrwhitt conceives that we have not one English romance, an- 
terior to Chaucer, which is not borrowed from a French one. 

* Those are, * The Squire of Low Degree,' ' Sir Tryamour,' and ' Sir 
Eglamour.' Respecting two of those, Mr. Ellis shows that Ritson might 
have spared himself the trouble of making any concession, as the antiquity 
of ' The Squire of Low Degree' [Ritson, voL iii. p. 145] remains to be proved, 
it being mentioned by no writer before the sixteenth century, and not being 
known to be extant in any ancient MS. ' Sir Eglamour' contains allusions to 
its Norman pedigree. 

The difficulty of finding an original South British romance of this period, 
nnborrowed from a French original, seems to remain undisputed : but Mr. 
Walter Scott, in his edition of 'Sir Tristrem,' has presented the public 
with an ancient Scottish romance, which, according to Mr. Scott's theory, 
would demonstrate the ^English language to have been cultivated earlier 
in Scotland than in England.* I have elsewhere (post^ Scottish Poetry) 
expressed myself in terms of more unqualified assent to the supposition of 
Thomas of Erceldoune having been an original romancer, than I should 



[a " The strange appropriation of the Auchinleck poem as a Scottish pro- 
duction, when no single trace of the Scottish dialect is to be found through- 
out the whole romance which may not with equal truth be claimed as 
current in the north of England, while every marked peculiarity of the 
former is entirely wanting, can hardly require serious investigation. From 
this opinion the ingenious editor himself must long ago have been reclaimed. 
The singular doctrines relative to the rise and progress of the English lan- 
guage in North and South Britain may also be dismissed, as not immediately 
relevant. But when it is seriously affirmed that the English language was 
once spoken with greater purity in the Lowlands of Scotland than in this 
country, we * Sothrons ' receive the communication with the same smile 
of incredulity that we bestow upon the poetic dogma of the honest Fries- 
lander : — 

Buwter, breat, en greene tzies. 

Is guth Inglisch en guth Fries. 

Butter, bread, and green cheese. 
Is good English and good Friese." 

—Price, Warton's Hist., vol. i. p. 196., ed. 1824. 

" As to the Essayist's assertion (Mr. Price's) that the language of ' Sir 
Tristrem' has in it nothing distinctively Scottish — this is a point on which 
the reader will, perhaps, consider the authority of Sir Walter Scott as 
sufficient to countervail that of the most accom lished English antiquary." 
— Lockhart, Advt. to ' Sir Tristrem,' 1833. 

No one has yet satisfactorily accounted for the Elizabethan-like Inylis of 
Barbour and Blind Harry, or the Saxon Layamon-like Inglis of Gawain 
Douglas. Did Barbour, who wrote in 1375, write in advance of his age, 
and Douglas, who began and ended his 'iEneid' in 1513-14, behind his 
age ? Or did each represent the spoken language of the times they wrote in ? 

Scott's view of the priority in cultivation of Inglis in Scotland over 
England is sanctioned by Ellis in the Introducti(m (p. 127) to his ' Metrical 
Romances.'] 



24 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETEY. [part i. 

In the reign of Edward II., Adam Davie, who was marshal of 
Stratford-le-Bow, near London, wrote ' Visions ' in verse, which 

be inclined to use upon mature consideration. Eobert de Brunne certainly 
alludes to ' Sir Tristrem,' as " the most famous of all gests" in his time.^ He 
mentions Erceldoune, its author, and another poet of the name of Kendale. 
Of Kendale, whether he was Scotch or English, nothing seems to be known 
with certainty. With respect to Thomas of Erceldoune, or Thomas the 
Ehymer, the Auchinleck MS. published by my illustrious friend professes 
to be the work not of Erceldoune himself, but of some minstrel or reciter 
who had heard the story from Thomas. Its language is confessed to be that 
of the fourteenth century, and the MS. is not pretended to be less than 
eighty years older than the supposed date of Thomas of Erceldoune's 
romance. Accordiugly, whatever Thomas the Ehymer's production might 
be, this Auchinleck MS. is not a transcript of it, but the ti-anscript of the 
composition of some one who heard the story from Thomas of Erceldoune. 
It is a specimen bf Scottish poetry not in the thirteenth but the fourteenth 
century. How much of the matter or manner of Thomas the Ehymer was 
retained by his deputy reciter of the story, eighty years after the assumed 
date of Thomas's work, is a subject of mere conjecture. 

Still, however, the fame of Erceldoune and Tristrem remain attested by 
Eobert de Brimne; and Mr. Scott's doctrine is, that Thomas the Ehymer, 
having picked up the chief materials of his romantic history of ' Sir Tristrem' 
from British traditions surviving on the border, was not a translator from 
the French, but an original authority to the continental romancers. It is 
nevertheless acknowledged that the story of ' Sir Tristrem' had been told in 
French, and was familiar to the romancers of that language, long before 
Thomas the Ehymer could have set about picking up British traditions on 
the border, and in all probability before he was born. The possibility, 
therefore, of his having heard the story in Norman minstrelsy, is put beyond 
the reach of denial.^ On the other hand, Mr. Scott argues that the Scottish 
bard must have been an authority to the continental romancers, from two 
circumstances. In the first place, there are two metrical fragments of 
French romance preserved in the library of Mr. Douce, which, according 
to Mr. Scott, tell the story of ' Sir Tristrem' in a manner corresponding with 
the same tale as it is told by Thomas of Erceldoune, and in which a reference 
is made to the authority of a Thomas. But the whole force of this argument 
evidently depends on the supposition of Mr. Donee's fragments being the 
work of one and the same author — whereas they are not, to all appearance, 



* [Over gestes it has the steem 
Over all that is or was. 
If men it sayd as made Thomas.] 

b ['Sir Tristrem,' like almost all our romances, had a foreign origin — its 
language alone is ours. Three copies — in French, in Anglo-Norman, and in 
Greek — composed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and edited by 
Prancisque Michel, appeared in two vols. 8vo. at London in 1835. But 
Scott never stood out for Thomas's invention. " The tale," he says, " lays 
claim to a much higher antiquity." (P. 27, ed. 1833.) To a British 
antiquity, however. See also Scott's ' Essay on Eomance,' in 31 isc. Prose 
Works (vol. vi. p. 201), where he contends that it was derived from Welsh 
traditions, though told by a Saxon poet.] 



PART I.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 25 

appear to be original ; and * The Battle of Jerusalem/ in which he 
turned into rhyme the contents of a French prose romance.* lu 

by the same author. A single perusal will enable us to observe how remark- 
ably they differ in style. They have no appearance of being parts of the 
same story, one of them placing the court of King Mark at Tintagil, the 
other at London. Only one of the fragments refers to the authority of a 
Thomas, and the style of that one bears very strong marks of being French 
of the twelfth century, a date which would place it beyond the possibility of 
its referring to Thomas of Erceldoune.'* The second of Mr. Scott's proofs of 
the originality of the Scottish romance is, that Gotfried von Strasburg, in 
a German romance written about the middle of the thirteenth century, 
refers to Thomas of Britania as his original. Thomas of Britania is, how- 
ever, a vague word ; and among the Anglo-Norman poets there might be 
one named Thomas, who might have told a story which was confessedly 
told in many shapes in the French language, and which was known in 
France before the Rhymer could have flourished ; and to tliis Anglo-Norman 
Thomas, Gotfried might refer. Eichhorn, the German editor, says that 
Gotfried translated his romance from the Norman French. Mr. Scott, in 
his edition of ' Sir Tristrem,' after conjecturing one date for the birth of 
Thomas the Rhymer, avowedly alters it for the sake of identifying the 
Rhymer with Gotfried's Thomas of Britania, and places his birth before the 
end of the twelfth century. This, he allows, would extend the Rhymer's 
life to upwards of ninety years, a pretty fair age for the Scottish Tiresias ; 
but if he survived 1296, as Harry the Minstrel informs us, he must have 
lived to beyond an hundred.^ 

* [His other works were, ' The Legend of St. Alexius,' from the Latin ; 
' Scripture Histories ;' and ' Fifteen Tokens before the Day of Judgment.* 
The last two were paraphrases of Scripture. Mr. Ellis ultimately retracted 
his opinion, adopted from Warton, that he was the author of a romance 
entitled 'The Life of Alexander,' printed in Weber's Collection. — See 
Ellis's Met. Horn., vol. i. p. 130.] 



* [This passage is quoted by the late learned Mr. Price in a Note to 
* Sir Tristrem,' appended to Warton's History. " In addition," says Price, 
*' it may be observed that the language of this fragment, so far from 
vesting Thomas with the character of an original writer, affirms directly 
the reverse. It is clear that in the writer's opinion the earliest and most 
authentic narrative of Tristrem's story was to be found in the work of Breri. 
From his relation later minstrels had chosen to deviate ; but Thomas, who 
had also composed a romance upon the subject, not only accorded with 
Breri in the order of his events, but entered into a justification of himself 
and his predecessor, by proving the inconsistency and absurdity of these 
newfangled variations. If, therefore, the romance of Thomas be in exist- 
ence, it must contain this vindication ; the poem in the Auchinleck MS. is 
entirely silent on the subject."] 

^ [There is now but one opinion of Scott's ' Sir Tristrem' — that it is not, as 
he would have it, the work of Thomas of Erceldoune, but the work of some 
after bard that had heard Thomas tell the story — in other words, an imper- 
fect transcript of the Erceldoune copy. Thomas's own tale is something 
we may wish for, but we may despair of finding. That Kendale wrote 
Scott's ' Sir Tristrem' is the fair enough supposition of Mr. David Laiug. — 
Dunbar, vol. i. p. 38.] 



26 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part i. 

the course of Adam Davie's account of the siege of Jerusalem, 
Pilate challenges our Lord to single combat. From the spe- 
cimens afforded by Warton, no very high idea can be formed of 
the genius of this poetical marshaL Warton anticipates the sur- 
prise of his reader, in finding the English language improve so 
slowly when we reach the verses of Davie. The historian of our 
poetry had, in a former section, treated of Robert de Brunne as 
a writer anterior to Davie ; but as the latter part of De Brunne's 
* Chronicle' was not finished till 1339, in the reign of Edward III., 
it would be surprising indeed if the language should seem to 
improve when we go back to the reign of Edward II.* Davie's 
work may be placed in our poetical chronology posterior to the 
first part of De Brunne's ' Chronicle,' but anterior to the latter. 

Richard Rolle, another of our earliest versifiers, died in 1 349-1 
Ke was a hermit, and led a secluded life near the nunnery of 
Hampole, in Yorkshire. Seventeen of his devotional pieces are 
enumerated in Ritson's * Bibliographia Poetica.' The penitential 
psalms and theological tracts of a hermit were not likely to enrich 
or improve the style of our poetry ; and they are accordingly 
confessed, by those who have read them, to be very dull. His name 
challenges notice only from the paucity of contemporary writers. 

Laurence Minot, although he is conjectured to have been a 
monk, had a Muse of a livelier temper ; and, for want of a better 
poet, he may, by courtesy, be called theTyrtseus of his age. His 
few poems which have reached us are, in fact, short narrative 
ballads on the victories obtained in the reign of Edward III., 
beginning with that of Hallidown Hill, and ending with the siege 
of Guisnes Castle. As his poem on the last of these events was 
evidently written recently after the exploit, the era of his poetical 
career may be laid between the years 1332 and 1352. Minot's 
works lay in absolute oblivion till late in the last century, in a 
MS. of the Cotton Collection, which was supposed to be a tran- 
script of the works of Chaucer. The name of Richard Chawfir 
having been accidentally scrawled on a spare leaf of the MS. 

* [In this the usual accuracy and candour of Mr. Campbell appear to 
have forsaken him. Warton's observation is far from being a general one, 
and might have been interpreted to the exclusion of De Brunne. That such 
was Warton's intention is obvious, &c. — Price, Warton, vol. ii. p. 52.] 

t [Ellis, vol. i. p. U6. Warton (vol. ii. p. 90) calls him Kichard Ham- 
pole.] 



PART I.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 27 

(probably the name of its ancient possessor), the framer of the 
Cotton catalogue very goodnatu redly converted it into Geoffrey 
Chaucer. By this circumstance Mr. Tyrvvhitt, when seeking 
materials for his edition of the ' Canterbury Tales/ accidentally 
discovered an English versifier older than Chaucer himself. The 
style of Minot's ten military ballads is frequently alliterative, 
and has much of the northern dialect. He is an easy and lively 
versifier, though not, as Mr. G. Chalmers denominates him, either 
elegant or energetic* 

In the course of the fourteenth century our language seems to 
have been inundated with metrical romances, until the public 
taste had been palled by the mediocrity and monotony of the 
greater part of them. At least, if Chaucer's Host in the ' Canter- 
bury Tales' be a fair representation of contemporary opinion, 
they were held in no great reverence, to judge by the comparison 
which the vintner applies to the '^draftyrhymings" of 'Sir Topaz. 'j 
The practice of translating French metrical romances into English 
did not, however, terminate in the fourteenth century. Nor 
must we form an indiscriminate estimate of the ancient metrical 
romances, either from Chaucer's implied contempt for them, nor 
from mine host of the Tabard's ungainly comparison with respect 
to one of them. The ridiculous style of ' Sir Topaz ' is not an 
image of them all. Some of them, far from being chargeable 
with impertinent and prolix description, are concise in narration, 
and paint, with rapid but distinct sketches, the battles, the 
banquets, and the rites of worship of chivalrous life. Classical 
poetry has scarcely ever conveyed in shorter boundaries so many 
interesting and complicated events as may be found in the good 
old romance of ' Le BoneFlorence.'l Chaucer himself, when he 
strikes into the new or allegorical school of romance, has many 
passages more tedious and less affecting than the better parts of 
those simple old fablers. For in spite of their puerility in the 

* [An edition of Minot's poems was one of Ritson's many contributions to 
the elucidation of early English language and literature.] 

+ [The ' Rime of Sir Topaz.' which Chaucer introduces as a parody, un- 
doubtedly, of the rhythmical romances of the age, is interrupted by mine 
host Harry Bailly with the strongest and most energetic expressions of total 
and absolute contempt. — Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 
209.] 

X Given in Ritson's ' Old Metrical Romances.' 



28 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETEY. [part i; , 

excessive use of the marvellous, their simplicity is often touching, 
and they have many scenes that would form adequate subjects for 
the best historical pencils. 

The reign of Edward III. was illustrious not for military 
achievements alone ; it was a period when the English character 
displayed its first intellectual boldness. It is true that the history 
of the times presents a striking contrast between the light of in- 
telligence which began to open on men's minds, and the frightful 
evils which were still permitted to darken the face of society. 
In the scandalous avarice of the church, in the corruptions of the 
courts of judicature, and in the licentiousness of a nobility who 
countenanced disorders and robbery, we trace the unbanished 
remains of barbarism ; but, on the other hand, we may refer to 
this period for the genuine commencement of our literature, for 
the earliest diffusion of free inquiry, and for the first great move- 
ment of the national mind towards emancipation from spiritual 
tyranny. The abuses of religion were, from their nature, the 
most powerfully calculated to arrest the public attention ; and 
poetry was not deficient in contributing its influence to expose 
those abuses, both as subjects of ridicule and of serious indignation. 
Two poets of this period, with very different powers of genius, 
and probably addressing themselves to different classes of society, 
made the corruptions of the clergy the objects of their satire 
— taking satire not in its mean and personal acceptation, but 
understanding it as the moral warfare of indignation and ridicule 
against turpitude and absurdity. Those writers were Langlande 
and Chaucer, both of whom have been claimed as primitive re- 
formers by some of the zealous historians of the Reformation. 
At the idea of a full separation from the Catholic church both 
Langlande and Chaucer would possibly have been struck with 
horror. The doctrine of predestination, which was a leading 
tenet of the first Protestants, is not, I believe, avowed in any of 
Chaucer's writings, and it is expressly reprobated by Langlande. 
It is, nevertheless, very likely that their works contributed to 
promote the Reformation. Langlande, especially, who was an 
earlier satirist and painter of manners than Chaucer, is undaunted 
in reprobating the corruptions of the papal government. He 
prays to Heaven to amend the Pope, whom he charges with pil- 
laging the church, interfering unjustly with the king, and causing 



PART I.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 29 

the blood of Christians to be wantonly shed ; and it is a curious 
circumstance that he predicts the existence of a king who, in his 
vengeance, would destroy the monasteries. 

The work entitled ' Visions of William concerning Piers Plow- 
man,'* and concerning the origin, progress, and perfection of the 
Christian life, which is the earliest known orignal poem, of any 
extent, in the English language, is ascribed to Robert Langlande 
[or Longlande], a secular priest, born at Mortimer's Cleobury, 
in Shropshire, and educated at Oriel College, Oxford. That it 
was written by Langlande, I believe, can be traced to no higher 
authority than that of Bale, or of the printer Crowley ; but his 
name may stand for that of its author until a better claimant 
shall be found. 

Those ' Visions,' from their allusions to events evidently recent, 
can scarcely be supposed to have been finished later than the year 
1362, almost thirty years before the appearance of the ' Canter- 
bury Tales.'f 

It is not easy, even after Dr. Whitaker's laborious analysis of 
this work, to give any concise account of its contents. The 
general object is to expose, in allegory, the existing abuses of 
society, and to inculcate the public and private duties both of the 
laity and clergy. An imaginary seer, afterwards described by 
the name of William, wandering among the bushes of the Mal- 
vern hills, is overtaken by sleep, and dreams that he beholds a 
magnificent tower, which turns out to be the tower or fortress of 
Truth, and a dungeon, which we soon after learn is the abode 
of Wrong. In a spacious plain in front of it the whole race 
of mankind are employed in their respective pursuits ; such as 
husbandmen, merchants, minstrels with their audiences, begging 
friars, and itinerant venders of pardons, leading a dissolute life 
under the cloak of religion. The last of these are severely 
satirized. A transition is then made to the civil grievances of 
society ; and the policy, not the duty, of submitting to bad princes, 
is illustrated by the parable of the Rats and Cats. In the second 
canto, True Religion descends, and demonstrates, with many 

* The work is commonly entitled the ' Visions of Piers Plowman,' but 
incorrectly, for Piers is not the dreamer who sees the visions, but one of the 
characters who is beheld, and who represents the Christian life. 

[t See Mr. Price's Note in Warton, vol. ii. p. 101, and Appendix to the 
same volume.] 



30 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part ^ ' 

precepts, how the conduct of individuals and the general manage- 
ment of society may be amended. In the third and fourth cantos, 
Mede or Bribery is exhibited, seeking a marriage with Falsehood, 
and attempting to make her way to the courts of justice, wher6 
it appears that she has many friends, both among the civil judges 
and ecclesiastics. The poem after this becomes more and more 
desultory. The author awakens more than once ; but, forgetting f^ 
that he has told us so, continues to converse as freely as ever 9 
with the moral phantasmagoria of his dream. A long train of ' 
allegorical personages, whom it would not be very amusing to 
enumerate, succeeds. In fact, notwithstanding Dr. Whitaker's 
discovery of a plan and unity in this work, I cannot help thinking, : 
with Warton, that it possesses neither ; at least, if it has any 
design, it is the most vague and ill-constructed that ever entered s 
into the brain of a waking dreamer. The appearance of the 'i 
visionary personages is often sufficiently whimsical. The power 
of Grace, for instance, confers upon Piers Plowman, or " Chris- 
tian Life," four stout oxen, to cultivate the field of Truth ; these 
are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the last of whom is de- 
scribed as the gentlest of the team. She afterwards assigns him 
the like number of stots or bullocks, to harrow what the evan- 
gelists had ploughed ; and this new horned team consists of Saint 
or stot Ambrose, stot Austin, stot Gregory, and stot Jerome.* 

The verse of Langlande is alliterative, without rhyme, and of 
triple time. • In modern pronunciation it divides the ear between . 
an anapaestic and dactylic cadence ; though some of the verses 5 
are reducible to no perceptible metre. Mr. Mitford, in his I 
^ Harmony of Languages,' thinks that the more we accommodate ! 
the reading of it to ancient pronunciation, the more generally 
we shall find it run in an anapaestic measure. His style, even 
making allowance for its antiquity, has a vulgar air, and seems 
to indicate a mind that would have been coarse, though strong, 
in any state of society. But, on the other hand, his work, with 
all its tiresome homilies, illustrations from school divinity, and 
uncouth phraseolog)^, has some interesting features of originality. 

* [If some of the criticisms in this genial Essay prove rather startling to 
the zealous admirer of our early literature, he will attribute them to the 
same cause which, duriug an age of romantic poetry, makes the effusions of 
Mr. Campbell's ISIuse appear an echo of the chaste simplicity and measured 
energy of Attic song. — Price, Warton, vol. i. p. 107.] 



I 

I PART I.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 31 

1-_J . 

j He employs no borrowed materials ; he is the earliest of our 

' writers in whom there is a tone of moral reflection ; and his sen- 

! timents are those of bold and solid integrity. The zeal of truth 

was in him ; and his vehement manner sometimes rises to elo- 

1 quence, when he denounces hypocrisy and imposture. The mind 

is struck with his rude voice, proclaiming independent and popular 

I sentiments from an age of slavery and superstition, and thun- 

i dering a prediction in the ear of papacy, which was doomed to 

be literally fulfilled at the distance of nearly two hundred years. 

His allusions to contemporary life afford some amusing glimpses 

of its manners. There is room to suspect that Spenser was 

acquainted with his works ; and Milton, either from accident or 

design, has the appearance of having had one of Langlande's 

passages in his mind when he wrote the sublime description of 

the lazar-house, in ' Paradise Lost.' * 

Chaucer was probably known and distinguished as a poet ante- 
rior to the appearance of Langlande's ^ Visions.' Indeed, if he 
had produced nothing else than his youthful poem, ^ The Court 
of Love,' it was sufficient to indicate one destined to harmonise 
and refine the national strains. But it is likely that before his 
thirty-fourth year, about which time Langlande's * Visions ' may 
be supposed to have been finished, Chaucer had given several 
compositions to the public. 

The simple old narrative romance had become too familiar in 
Chaucer's time to invite him to its beaten track. The poverty 
of his native tongue obliged him to look round for subsidiary 
materials to his fancy, both in the Latin language and in some 
modern foreign source that should not appear to be trite and 
exhausted. His age was, unfortunately, little conversant with 
the best Latin classics. Ovid, Claudian, and Statius were the 
chief favourites in poetry, and Boethius in prose.| The alle- 
gorical style of the last of those authors seems to have given an 
early bias to the taste of Chaucer. In modern poetry, his first 
and long-continued predilection was attracted by the new and 

* [B. xi. 1. 475, &c. This coincidence is remarked by Mrs. Cooper in 
her ' Muses' Library.' — Ellis, vol. i. p. 157.] 

t [The ' Consolation of Boethius ' was translated by Alfred the Great and 
by Queen Elizabeth. No unfair proof of its extraordinary popularity may 
be derived from ' The Quair ' of King James I. It seems to have been a truly 
regal book.] 



32 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [pabt i. 

allegorical style of romance which had sprung up in France in 
the thirteenth century, under William de Lorris. We find him, 
accordingly, during a great part of his poetical career, engaged 
among the dreams, emblems, flower-worshippings, and amatory 
parliaments of that visionary school. Tliis, we may say, was a 
gymnasium of rather too light and playful exercise for so strong 
a genius ; and it must be owned that his allegorical poetry is 
often puerile and prolix. Yet, even in this walk of fiction, we 
never entirely lose sight of that peculiar grace and gaiety which 
distinguish the Muse of Chaucer ; and no one who remembers his 
productions of ' The House of Fame,' and ' The Flower and the' 
Leaf,' will regret that he sported for a season in the field of 
allegory. Even his pieces of this description the most fantastic" 
in design and tedious in execution are generally interspersed with 
fresh and joyous descriptions of external nature. 

In this new species of romance, we perceive the youthful Muse 
of the language in love with mystical meanings and forms of 
fancy, more remote, if possible, from reality than those of the 
chivalrous fable itself; and we could sometimes wish her back 
from her emblematic castles to the 'more solid ones of the elder 
fable ; but still she moves in pursuit of those shadows with an 
impulse of novelty, and an exuberance of spirit, that is not 
wholly without its attraction and delight. 

Chaucer was afterw^ards happily drawn to the more natural 
style of Boccaccio, and from him he derived the hint of a subject * 
in which, besides his own original portraits of contemporary life, 
he could introduce stories of every description, from the most 
heroic to the most familiar. 

Gower, thougli he had been earlier distinguished in French 
poetry, began later than Chaucer to cultivate his native tongue. 
His ' Confessio Amantis,' the only work by which he is known 
as an English poet, did not appear till the sixteenth year of 
Richard II. He must have been a highly accomplished man for 
his time, and imbued with a studious and mild spirit of reflection. 
His French sonnets are marked by elegance and sensibility, and 
his English poetry contains a digest of all that constituted the 
knowledge of his age. His contemporaries greatly esteemed 
him ; and the Scottish as well as English writers of the subse- 
* [The Canterbury Tales.] 



PABT I.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 33 

I quent period speak of him with unqualified admiration. But 
though the placid and moral Gower might be a civilising spirit 
' among his contemporaries, his character has none of the bold 
; originality which stamps an influence on the literature of a 
I country. He was not, like Chaucer, a patriarch in the family of 
genius, the scattered traits of whose resemblance may be seen in 
I such descendants as Shakspeare and Spenser.* The design of 
• his * Confessio Amantis ' is peculiarly ill contrived. A lover, 
j whose case has not a particle of interest, applies, according to the 
I Catholic ritual, to a confessor, who, at the same time, whimsi- 
! cally enough, bears the additional character of a pagan priest of 
■ Venus. The holy father, it is true, speaks like a good Christian, 
and communicates more scandal about the intrigues of Venus 
I than pagan author ever told. A pretext is afforded by the cere- 
mony of confession for the priest not only to initiate his pupil 
in the duties of a lover, but in a wide range of ethical and phy- 
sical knowledge ; and at the mention of every virtue and vice a 
tale is introduced by way of illustration. Does the confessor 
wish to warn the lover against impertinent curiosity ? he intro- 
duces, a propos to that failing, the history of Actaeon, of peeping 
memory. The confessor inquires if he is addicted to a vain- 
glorious disposition ; because, if he is, he can tell him a story 
about Nebuchadnezzar. Does he wish to hear of the virtue of 
conjugal patience ? it is aptly inculcated by the anecdote respect- 
ing Socrates, who, when he received the contents of Xantippe's 
pail upon his head, replied to the provocation with only a witti- 
cism. Thus, with shriving, narrations, and didactic speeches, the 
work is extended to thirty thousand lines, in the course of which 
the virtues and vices are all regularly allegorized. But in 
allegory Gower is cold and uninventive, and enumerates qualities 
when he should conjure up visible objects. On the whole, 
though copiously stored with facts and fables, he is unable either 
to make truth appear poetical, or to render fiction the graceful 
vehicle of truth. 

* [Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr. "Waller of Fairfax. 
Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused 
into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his 
decease.— Dryden, Malone, vol. iv. p. 592.] 



34 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part ii. 



PART II. 

Warton, with great beauty and justice, compares the appear- 
ance of Chaucer in our language to a premature day in an 
English spring ; after which the gloom of winter returns, and t 
the buds and blossoms, which have been called forth by a tran- 
sient sunshine, are nipped by frosts and scattered by storms. The 
causes of the relapse of our poetry, after Chaucer, seem but too 
apparent in the annals of English history, which during five 
reigns of the fifteenth century continue to display but a tissue of 
conspiracies, proscriptions, and bloodshed. Inferior even to 
France in literary progress, England displays in the fifteenth 
century a still more mortifying contrast with Italy. Italy too 
had her religious schisms and public distractions ; but her arts 
and literature had always a sheltering place. They were even 
cherished by the rivalship of independent communities, and re- 
ceived encouragement from the opposite sources of commercial 
and ecclesiastical wealth. But we had no Nicholas V., nor 
house of Medicis. In England the evils of civil war agi- 
tated society as one mass. There was no refuge from them — no 
enclosure to fence in the field of improvement — no mound to 
stem the torrent of public troubles. Before the death of Henry 
VI., it is said that one half of the nobility and gentry in the 
kingdom had perished in the field or on the scaffold. Whilst in 
England the public spirit was thus brutalised, whilst the value 
and security of life were abridged, whilst the wealth of the rich 
was employed only in war, and the chance of patronage taken \ 
from the scholar, in Italy princes and magistrates vied with 
each other in calling men of genius around them, as the brightest 
ornaments of their states and courts. The art of printing came 
to Italy to record the treasures of its literary attainments ; but 
when it came to England, with a very few exceptions, it could 
not be said, for the purpose of diff^iising native literature, to be a 
necessary art. A circumstance, additionally hostile to the 



TART II.] FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 35 

national genius may certainly be traced in the executions for 
religion which sprang up as a horrible novelty in our country 
in the fifteenth century. The clergy were determined to indem- 
nify themselves for the exposures which they had met with in the 
preceding age, and the unhallowed compromise which Henry 
IV. made with them, in return for supporting his accession, 
armed them, in an evil hour, with the torch of persecution. In 
one point of improvement, namely, in the boldness of religious 
inquiry, the North of Europe might already boast of being 
superior to the South, with all its learning, wealth, and elegant 
acquirements. The Scriptures had been opened by Wickliff, 
but they were again to become " a fountain sealed, and a spring 
shut up." Amidst the progress of letters in Italy, the fine arts 
threw enchantment around superstition ; and the warm imagina- 
tion of the South was congenial with the nature of Catholic 
institutions. But the English mind had already shown, even 
amidst its comparative barbarism, a stern independent spirit of 
religion ; and from this single proud and elevated point of its 
character it was now to be crushed and beaten down. Some- 
times a baffled struggle against oppression is more depressing to 
the human faculties than continued submission. 

Our natural hatred of tyranny, and, we may safely add, the 
general test of history and experience, would dispose us to 
believe religious persecution to be necessarily and essentially 
baneful to the elegant arts, no less than to the intellectual pur- 
suits of mankind. It is natural to think that, when punishments are 
let loose upon men's opinions, they will spread a contagious alarm 
from the understanding to the imagination. They will make the 
heart grow close and insensible to generous feelings, where it is 
unaccustomed to express them freely ; and the graces and gaiety 
of fancy will be dejected and appalled. In an age of persecution, 
even the living study of his own species must be comparatively 
darkened to the poet. He looks round on the characters and 
countenances of his fellow- creatures ; and instead of the naturally 
cheerful and eccentric variety of their humours, he reads only 
a sullen and oppressed uniformity. To the spirit of poetry we 
should conceive such a period to be an impassable Avernus, 
where she would drop her wings and expire. Undoubtedly this 
inference will be found warranted by a general survey of the 

i>2 



36 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part it. 

history of Genius. It is, at the same time, impossible to deny, 
that wit and poetry have in some instances flourished coeval with 
ferocious bigotry, on the same spot, and under the same govern- 
ment. The literary glory of Spain was posterior to the establish- 
ment of the Inquisition. The fancy of Cervantes sported in its 
neighbourhood, though he declared that he could have made his 
writings still more entertaining, if he had not dreaded the Holy 
Office. But the growth of Spanish genius, in spite of the co- 
existence of religious tyranny, was fostered by uncommon and 
glorious advantages in the circumstances of the nation. Spain 
(for we are comparing Spain in the sixteenth with England in 
the fifteenth century) was, at the period alluded to, great and 
proud in an empire on which it was boasted that the sun never 
set. Her language was widely diffused. The wealth of America 
for awhile animated all her arts. Robertson says that the 
Spaniards discovered at that time an extent of political know- 
ledge which the English themselves did not attain for more than 
a centur}^ afterwards. Religious persecutions began in England 
at a time when she was comparatively poor and barbarous, yet 
after she had been awakened to so much intelligence on the sub- 
ject of religion as to make one half of the people indignantly 
impatient of priestly tj-ranny. If we add to the political troubles 
of the age the circumstance of religious opinions being silenced 
and stifled by penal horrors, it will seem more wonderful that the 
spark of literature was kept alive, than that it did not spread 
more widely. Yet the fifteenth centurj^ had its redeeming traits 
of refinement, the more wonderful for appearing in the midst of 
such unfavourable circumstances. It had a Fortescue, although 
he wandered in exile, unprotected by the constitution which he 
explained and extolled in his writings. It had a noble patron 
and lover of letters in Tiptoft,* although he died by the hands of 
the executioner. It witnessed the founding of many colleges in 
both of the universities, although they were still the haunts of 
scholastic quibbling ; and it produced, in the venerable Pecock, 
one conscientious dignitary of the church, who wished to have 
converted the Protestants by appeals to reason, though for so 
doing he had his books, and, if he had not recanted in good time, 
would have had his body also, committed to the flames. To these 
* Earl of Worcester. 



PiLKT II.] FIFTEENTH CENTURY. .37 

causes may be ascribed the backwardness of our poetry between the 
dates of Chaucer and Spenser. I speak of the chasm extending 
to, or nearly to, Spenser ; for, without undervaluing the elegant 
talents of Lord Surrey, I think we cannot consider the national 
genius as completely emancipated from oppressive circumstances 
till the time of Elizabeth. There was indeed a commencement 
of our poetry under Henry VIII. It was a fine, but a feeble 
one. English genius seems then to have come forth, but half 
assured that her day of emancipation was at hand. There is 
something melancholy even in Lord Surrey's strains of gallantry. 
The succession of Henry VIII. gave stability to the government, 
and some degree of magnificence to the state of society. But 
tyranny was not yet at an end ; and to judge not by the gross 
buffoons, but by the few minds entitled to be called poetical, 
which appear in the earlier part of the sixteenth centur}' , we 
may say that the English Muse had still a diffident aspect and a 
faltering tone. 

There is a species of talent, however, which may continue to 
endite what is called poetry, without having its sensibilities 
deeply affected by the circumstances of society ; and of luminaries 
of this description our fifteenth century was not destitute. Ritson 
hajs enumerated about seventy of them.* Of these, Occleve and 
Lydgate were the nearest successors to Chaucer. Occleve speaks 
of himself as Chaucer's scholar. He has, at least, the merit of 
expressing the sincerest enthusiasm for his master. But it is 
difficult to controvert the character which has been generally 
assigned to him, that of a flat and feeble writer. Excepting the 
adoption of his story of Fortunatus by William Browne in his 
Pastorals, and the modern republication of a few of his pieces, I 
know not of any public compliment which has ever been paid to 
his poetical memory. 

Lydgate is altogether the most respectable versifier of the 
fifteenth century. A list of 250 of the productions ascribed to 
him (which is given in Ritson's * Bibliographia Poetica ') attests 
at least the fluency of his pen ; and he seems to have ranged with 
the same facility through the gravest and the lightest subjects of 
composition. Ballads, hymns, ludicrous stories, legends, ro- 
mances, and allegories, were equally at his command. Verbose 
* In his ' Bibliographia Poetica.' 



38 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETEY. [pabt ii. 

and diffuse as Dan John of Bury must be allowed to have been, he 
is not without occasional touches of pathos. The poet Gray was 
the first in modern times who did him the justice to observe them.* 
His * Fall of Princes ' may also deserve notice, in tracing back the 
thread of our national poetry, as^^it is more likely than any other 
English production to have suggested to Lord Sackville the 
idea of his ' Mirror for Magistrates.' ' The Mirror for Magis- 
trates ' again gave hints to Spenser in allegory, and may also have 
possibly suggested to Shakspeare the idea of his historical plays. 

I know not if Hardynge,'!' who belonged to the reign of 
Edward IV., be worth mentioning as one of the obscure lumi- 
naries of this benighted age. He left a ' Chronicle of the History 
of England,' which possesses an incidental interest from his 
having been himself a witness to some of the scenes which he 
records ; for he lived in the family of the Percys, and fought 
under the banners of Hotspur ; but from the style of his versified 
' Chronicle,' his head would appear to have been much better fur- 
nished for sustaining the blows of the battle, than for contriving 
its poetical celebration. 

The Scottish poets of the fifteenth, and of a part of the six- 
teenth century, would also justly demand a place in any history 
of our poetry that meant to be copious and minute ; as the 
northern " makers," notwithstanding the difference of dialect, 
generally denominate their language " Inglis." Scotland pro- 
duced an entire poetical version of the ' j3Eneid ' before Lord 

* Ljdgate translated largely from the French and Latin. His prin- 
cipal poems are ' The Fall of Princes,' ' The Siege of Thebes,' and ' The 
Destruction of Troy.' The first of these is from Laurent's French version 
of Boccaccio's book, * De Casibus virorum et feminarum illustrium.' His 
' Siege of Thebes,' which was intended as an additional ' Canterbury 
Tale,' aud in the introduction to which he feigns himself in company 
with ' the host of the Tabard and the Pilgrims,' is compiled from Guide 
Colonna, Statins, and Seneca. His ' Destruction of Troy ' is from the 
work of Guido Colonna, or from a French translation of it. His ' London 
Lickpenny' is curious for the minute picture of the metropolis which 
it exhibits in the fifteenth century. A specimen of Lydgate's humour 
may be seen in his tale of ' The Prioress and her Three Wooers,' which 
Mr. Jamieson has given in his 'Popular Ballads and Songs' [vol. i. 
p. 249-266]. I had transcribed it from a manuscript in the British Museum 
[Harl. MS. 78], thinking that it was not in print, but found that Mr. Jamieson 
had anticipated me. 

t [A kind of Robert of Gloucester redivivus. — Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Pr. 
Works, vol. xvii. p. 13.] 



PABT II.] FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 39 

Surrey had translated a single book of it ; indeed before there 
was an English version of any classic, excepting Boethius, if he 
can be called a classic. Virgil was only known in the English 
language through a romance on the Siege of Troy, published by 
Caxton, which, as Bishop Douglas observes, in tlie prologue to 
his Scottish '^neid,' is no more like Virgil than the devil is like 
St. Austin.* Perhaps the resemblance may not even be so great. 
But the Scottish poets, after all that has been said of them, form 
nothing like a brilliant revival of poetry. They are on the 
whole superior, indeed, in spirit and originality to their English 
contemporaries, which is not^sayinsr much ; but their style is, for 
tlie most part, cast, if possible, in a worse taste. The prevailing 
fault of English diction, in the fifteenth century, is redundant 
ornament, and an affectation of anglicising Latin words. In this 
pedantry and use of *' aureate terms " the Scottish versifiers went 
even beyond their brethren of the South. Some exceptions to 
the remark, I am aware, may be found in Dunbar, who some- 
times exhibits simplicity and lyrical terseness ; but even A<> style 
has frequent deformities of quaintness, false ornament, and allite- 
ration. The rest of them, when they meant to be most eloquent, 
tore up words from the Latin, which never took root in the lan- 
guage, like children making a mock garden with flowers and 
branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither. 

From Lydgate down to Wyat and Surrey, there seem to be no 
southern writers deserving attention, unless for the purposes of 
the antiquary, excepting Hawes, Barklay, and Skelton ; and 
even their names might perhaps be omitted without treason to 
the cause of taste, j" 

Stephen Hawes,J who was groom of the chamber to Henry 
VII., is said to have been accomplished in the literature of France 
and Italy, and to have travelled into those countries. His most 

* [Warton, vol. iii. p. 112. Douglas is said to have \?ritten his transla- 
tion in the short space of sixteen months, and to have finished it in 1513. — 
This was before Surrey was horn /] 

t To the reign of Henry VI. belong Henry Lonelich, who plied the 
unpoetical trade of a skinner, and who translated the French romance of St. 
Graal ; Thomas Chestre, who made a free and enlarged version of the ' Lai 
de Lanval ' of the French poetess Marie ; and Robert Thornton, who versified 
the ' Morte Arthur' in the alliterative measure of Langlande. 

X [A bad imitator of Lydgate, ten times more tedious than his original. — 
Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Pr. Worhs, vol. xvii. p. 13.] 



40 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part ii. 

important production is the * Pastyme of Pleasure/* an allego- 
rical romance, the hero of which is Grandamour or Gallantry, and 
the heroine La Belle Pucelle, or Perfect Beauty. In this work 
the personified characters have all the capriciousness and vague 
moral meaning of the old French allegorical romance ; but the 
puerility of the school remains, while the zest of its novelty is 
gone. There is also in his foolish personage of Godfrey Gobe- 
live something of the burlesque of the worst taste of Italian 
poetry. It is certainly very tiresome to follow Hawes's hero, 
Grandamour, through all his adventures, studying grammar, 
rhetoric, and arithmetic in the tower of Doctrine ; afterwards 
slaughtering giants, who have each two or three emblematic 
heads ; sacrificing to heathen gods ; then marrying according to 
the Catholic rites ; and, finally, relating his own death and 
burial, to which he is so obliging as to add his epitaph. Yet, as 
the story seems to be of Hawes's invention, it ranks him above 
the mere chroniclers and translators of the age. Warton praises 
him for improving on the style of Lydgate. His language 
may be somewhat more modern, but in vigour or harmony I am 
at a loss to perceive in it any superiority. The indulgent his- 
torian of our poetry has, however, quoted one fine line from him, 
describing the fiery breath of a dragon which guarded the island 
of beauty : — 

" The fire was great ; it made the island light." 

Every romantic poem in his own language is likely to have inte- 
rested Spenser ; and if there were many such glimpses of magni- 
ficence in Hawes, we might suppose the author of ' The Fairy 
Queen ' to have cherished. his youthful genius by contemplating 
them ; but his beauties are too few and faint to have afforded any 
inspiring example to Spenser. 

Alexander Barklay was a priest of St. Mary Otterburne, in 
Devonshire, and died at a great age at Croydon in the year 1552. 
His principal work was a free translation of Sebastian Brandt's f 
* Navis Stultifera,' enlarged with some satirical strictures of his 

* He also wrote * The Temple of Glass/ the substance of which is taken 
from Chaucer's ' House of Fame/ [' The Temple of Glass' is now, as Mr. 
Hallam observes, by general consent restored to Lydgate. — Lit. Hist.,yo\. i. 
p. 432 ; and Price's Warton, vol, iii. p. 46-7.] 

f Sebastian Brandt was a civilian of Basil. 



PABT II.] FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 41 

own upon the manners of his English contemporaries. His * Ship 
of Fools' has been as often quoted as most obsolete English 
poems ; but if it were not obsolete it would not be quoted. He 
also wrote Eclogues, which are curious as the earliest pieces of 
that kind in our language. From their title we might be led to 
expect some interesting delineations of English rural customs at 
that period. But Barklay intended to be a moralist, and not a 
painter of nature ; and the chief though insipid moral which he 
inculcates is, that it is better to be a clown than a courtier.* 
The few scenes of country life which he exhibits for that purpose 
are singularly ill fitted to illustrate his doctrine, and present 
rustic existence under a miserable aspect, more resembling the 
caricature of Scotland in Churchill's ' Prophecy of Famine ' than 
anything which we can imagine to have ever been the general 
condition of English peasants. The speakers, in one of his 
eclogues, lie littered among straw, for want of a fire to keep 
themselves warm ; and one of them expresses a wish that the 
milk for dinner may be curdled, to save them the consumption 
of bread. As the writer's object was not to make us pity but 
esteem the rustic lot, this picture of English poverty can only 
be accounted for by supposing it to have been drawn from partial 
observation, or the result of a bad taste, that naturally delighted 
in squalid subjects of description. Barklay, indeed, though he 
has some stanzas which might be quoted for their strength of 
thought and felicity of expression, is, upon the whole, the least 
ambitious of all writers to adorn his conceptions of familiar life 
with either dignity or beauty. An amusing instance of this 
occurs in one of his moral apologues : Adam, he tells us in verse, 
was one day abroad at his work — Eve was at the door of the 
house, with her children playing about her ; some of them she 
was * kerabing,' says the poet, prefixing another participle, not of 

* Barklay gives some sketches of manners ; but they are those of the 
town, not the country. Warton is partial to his black-letter eclogues, 
because they contain allusions to the customs of the age. They certainly 
inform us at what hour our ancestors usually dined, supped, and went to 
bed ; that they were fond of good eating ; and tbat it was advisable, in the 
poet's opinion, for any one who attempted to help himself to a favourite 
dish at their banquets to wear a gauntlet of mail. Quin the player, who 
probably never had heard of Barklay, delivered at a much later period a 
similar observation on city feasts, namely, that the candidate for a good dish 
of turtle ought never to be without a basket-hilted knife and fork. 



42 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part n.^ 

the most delicate kind, to describe the usefulness of the comb.^ 
Her Maker having deigned to pay her a visit, she was ashamed 
to be found with so many ill-dressed children about her, and 
hastened to stow a number of them out of sight ; some of them 
she concealed under hay and straw, others she put up the chim- 
ney, and one or two into a " tub of draff." Having produced, 
however, the best looking and best dressed of them, she was de- 
lighted to hear their Divine Visitor bless them, and destine some 
of them to be kings and emperors, some dukes and barons, and 
others sheriffs, mayors, and aldermen. Unwilling that any of 
her family should forfeit blessings whilst they were going, she 
immediately drew out the remainder from their concealment ; 
but when they came forth they were so covered with dust and 
cobwebs, and had so many bits of chaff and straw sticking to 
their hair, that, instead of receiving benedictions and promotion, 
they were doomed to vocations of toil and poverty, suitable to 
their dirty appearance. 

John Skelton, who was the rival and contemporary of Barklay, 
was laureate to the University of Oxford, and tutor to the prince, 
afterwards Henry VIII. Erasmus must have been a bad judge 
of English poetry, or must have alluded only to the learning of 
Skelton, when in one of his letters he pronounces him " Britanni- 
carum literarum lumen et decus." There is certainly a vehemence 
and vivacity in Skelton which was worthy of being guided by a 
better taste ; and the objects of his satire bespeak some degree of 
public spirit.* But his eccentricity in attempts at humour is at 

* He was the determined enemy of the mendicant friars and of Cardinal 
Wolsey. The courtiers of Henry VIII., whilst obliged to flatter a minister 
whom they detested, could not but be gratified with Skelton's boldness in 
singly daring to attack him. In his picture of Wolsey at the Council Board, 
he thus describes the imperious minister :— 



" in chamber of Stars 

All matters there he mars ; 
Clapping his rod on the board, 
No man dare speak a word ; 
For he hath all the saying, 
Without any renaying. 

These lines are a remarkable "anticipation* of the very words in the fifteenth 
article of the charges preferred against Wolsey by the Parliament of 1 529 — 



He rolleth in his Records ; 

He sayeth, How say ye, my lords, 

Is not my reason good ? 

Good even, good Robin Hood. 

Some say Yes, and some 

Sit still, as they were dumb." 



* Neve's * Cursory Remarks on the English Poets.' 



PART II.] FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 43 



once vulgar and flippant ; and his style is almost a texture of 
slang phrases, patched with shreds of French and Latin. We 
are told, indeed, in a periodical work of the present day, that his 
i manner is to be excused, because it was assumed for " the nonce," 
■and was suited to the taste of his contemporaries. But it is 
! surely a poor apology for the satirist of any age to say that he 
jstooped to humour its vilest taste, and could not ridicule vice 
land folly without degrading himself to buffoonery.* Upon the 
I whole, we might regard the poetical feeling and genius of Eng- 
iland as almost extinct at the end of the fifteenth century, if the 
beautiful ballad of the ' Nut-brown Maid ' were not to be re- 
jferred to that period.f It is said to have been translated from 
jthe German ; but even considered as a translation it meets us as 
,a surprising flower amidst the winter-solstice of our poetry. 

The literary character of England was not established till near 
the end of the sixteenth century. At the beginning of that cen- 
tury, immediately anterior to Lord Surrey, we find Barklay and 
Skelton popular candidates for the foremost honours of English 
poetry. They are but poor names. Yet, slowly as the improve- 



*• That the said Lord Cardinal, sitting among the Lords and other of your 
Majesty's most honourable Council, used himself so, that, if any man would 
show his mind according to his duty, he would so take him up with his 
accustomable words, that they were better to hold their peace than to speak ; 
so that he would hear no more speak but one or two great personages, so 
that he would have all the words himself, and consumed much time without 
a fair tale." His ridicule drew down the wrath of Wolsey, who ordered 
him to be apprehended. But Skelton fled to the sanctuary of Westminster 
Abbey, where he was protected ; and died in the same year in which 
"Wolsey 's prosecutors drew up the article of impeachment, so similar to the 
satire of the poet. 

* [I know Skelton only by the modern edition of his works, dated 1736. 
But from this stupid publication I can easily discover that he was no ordi- 
nary man. Why Warton and the writers of his school rail at him vehe- 
mently I know not ; he was perhaps the best scholar of his day, and displays 
on many occasions strong powers of description, and a vein of poetry that 
shines through all the rubbish which ignorance has spread over it. He 
flew at high game, and therefore occasionally called in the aid of vulgar 
ribaldry to mask the direct attack of his satire. — Gifford, Jonson, vol. viii. 
p. 77. 

The power, the strangeness, the volubility of his language, the intrepidity 
of his satire, and the perfect originality of his manner, render Skelton one 
of the most extraordinary poets of any age or country. — Southey, Specimens; 
and Quar. Rev., vol. xi. p. 485.] 

t Warton places it about the year 1500. [It was in print in 1521, if not 
a little earlier.] 



44 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part il 

meiit of our poetry seems to proceed in the early part of the six- 
teenth century, the circumstances which subsequently fostered 
the national genius to its maturity and magnitude begin to be 
distinctly visible even before the year 1500. The accession of 
Henry VII., by fixing the monarchy and the prospect of its re- 
gular succession, forms a great era of commencing civilization. 
The art of printing, which had been introduced in a former 
period of discord, promised to dijffuse its light in a steadier and 
calmer atmosphere. The great discoveries of navigation, by 
quickening the intercourse of European nations, extended their 
influence to England. In the short portion of the fifteenth cen- 
tury during which printing was known in this country, the press 
exhibits our literature at a lower ebb than even that of France ; 
but before that century was concluded the tide of classical learn- 
ing had fairly set in. England had received Erasmus, and had 
produced Sir Thomas More. The English poetry of the last of 
these great men is indeed of trifling consequence, in comparison 
with the general impulse which his other writings must have 
given to the ag-e in which he lived. But everything that excites 
the dormant intellect of a nation must be regarded as contri- 
buting to its future poetry. It is possible that in thus adverting 
to the diffusion of knowledge (especially classical knowledge) 
which preceded our golden age of originality, we may be chal- 
lenged by the question, how much the greatest of all our poets 
was indebted to learning. TVe are apt to compare such geniuses 
as Shakspeare to comets in the moral universe, which baffle all 
calculations as to the causes which accelerate or retard their ap- 
pearance, or from which we can predict their return. But those 
phenomena of poetical inspiration are, in fact, still dependent on ^ 
the laws and light of the system which they visit. Poets may be ^ 
indebted to the learning and philosophy of their age, without ; 
being themselves men of erudition or philosophers. When the 
fine spirit of truth has gone abroad, it passes insensibly from 
mind to mind, independent of its direct transmission from books ; 
and it comes home in a more welcome shape to the poet when 
caught from his social intercourse with his species than from 
solitary study. Shakspeare's genius was certainly indebted to 
the intelligence and moral principles which existed in his age, 
and to that intelligence and to those moral principles the revival 



^ARTii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 45 

] of classical literature undoubtedly contributed. So also did the 
I revival of pulpit eloquence, and the restoration of the Scriptures 
' to the people in their native tongue. The dethronement of 
! scholastic philosophy, and of the supposed infallibility of Aris- 
I totle's authority — an authority at one time almost paramount to 
, that of the Scriptures themselves — was another good connected 
I with the Reformation ; for though the logic of Aristotle long 
continued to be formally taught, scholastic theology was no 
longer sheltered beneath his name. Bible divinity superseded 
the fflosses of the schoolmen, and the writinars of Duns Scotus 
were consigned at Oxford to proclaimed contempt.* The reign 
of true philosophy was not indeed arrived, and the Reformation 
itself produced events tending to retard that progress of literature 
and intelligence which had sprung up under its first auspices. 
Still, with partial interruptions, the culture of classical literature 
proceeded in the sixteenth century ; and, amidst that culture, it 
is difficult to conceive that a system of Greek philosophy more 
poetical than Aristotle's was without its influence on the English 
spirit — namely, that of Plato. That England possessed a dis- 
tinct school of Platonic philosophy in the sixteenth century 
cannot, I believe, be affirmed, f but we hear of the Platonic 
studies of Sir Philip Sydney ; and traits of Platonism are some- 



* Namely, in the year 1535. The decline of Aristotle's authority, and 
that of scholasiic divinity, though to a certain degree connected, are not, 
however, to be identified. What were called the doctrines of Aristotle by 
the schoolmen were a mass of metaphysics established in his name, first by 
Arabic commentators, and afterwards by Catholic doctors, among the latter 
of whom many expounded the philosophy of the Stagyrite without under- 
standing a word of the original language in which his doctrines were 
written. Some Platonic opinions had also mixed with the metaphysics of 
the schoolmen, Aristotle was nevertheless their main authority ; though it 
is probable that, if he had come to life, he would not have fathered much 
of the philosophy which rested on his name. Some of the reformers threw 
off scholastic divinity and Arislotle's authority at once; but others, while 
they abjured the schoolmen, adhered to the Peripatetic system. In fact, 
until the revival of letters, Aristotle could not be said, with regard to the 
modern world, to be either fully known by his own works, or fairly tried 
by his own merits. Though ultimately overthrown by Bacon, his writings 
and his name, in the age immediately preceding Bacon, had ceased to be 
a mere stalking-horse to the schoolmen, and he was found to contain 
heresies which the Catholic metaphysicians had little suspected. 

t Enfield mentions no English school of Platonism before the time of 
Gale and Cudworth. [Hallam is equally silent.] 



4G ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part li. ' 

times beautifully visible in the poetry of Surrey and of Spenser.* 
The Italian Muse communicated a tinge of that spirit to our 
poetry, which must have been further excited in the minds of 
poetical scholars by the influence of Grecian literature. Hurd 
indeed observes that the Platonic doctrines had a deep influence 
on the sentiments and character of Spenser's age. They cer- 
tainly form a very poetical creed of philosophy. The Aris- 
totelian system was a vast mechanical labyrinth, which the 
human faculties were chilled, fatigued, and darkened by ex- 
ploring. Plato, at least, expands the imagination, for he was a 
great poet ; and if he had put in practice the law respecting 
poets which he prescribed to his ideal republic, he must have 
begun by banishing himself. 

The Reformation, though ultimately beneficial to literature, 
like all abrupt changes in society, brought its evil with its good. 
Its establishment under Edward YI. made the English too fana- 
tical and polemical to attend to the finer objects of taste. Its 
commencement under Henry VIII. , however promising at first, 
was too soon rendered frightful, by bearing the stamp of a tyrant's 
character, who, instead of opening the temple of religious peace, 
established a Janus-faced persecution against both the old and 
new opinions. On the other hand, Henry's power, opulence, and 

* In one of Spenser's hymns on Love and Beauty, he breathes this Plar- 
tonic doctrine:— 

" Every spirit, as it is most pure, 

And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
So it the fairer body doth procure 
To habit in, and it more fairly dight 
With cheerful grace and amiable sight ; 
For of the soul the body form doth take, 
For soul is form, and doth the body make." 

So, also, Surrey to his fair Geraldine : — 

" The golden gift that Nature did thee give, 
To fasten friends, and feed them at thy will 
With form and favour, taught me to believe 
How thou art made to show her greatest skill." 

This last thought was probably suggested by the lines in Petrarch, which 
express a doctrine of the Platonic school, respecting the idea or origin of 
beauty: — 

" In qual parte del ciel', in quale idea 
Era I'esempio onde Natura tolse 
Quel bel viso leggiadro, in che ella volse 
Mostrar quaggiii, quanto lassi potea.'' 



PART.ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 47 

ostentation gave some encouragement to the arts. He himself, 
monster as he was, affected to be a poet. His masques and 
pageants assembled the beauty and nobility of the land, and 
prompted a gallant spirit of courtesy. The cultivation of musical 
talents among his courtiers fostered our early lyrical poetry. Our 
intercourse with Italy was renewed from more enlightened mo- 
tives than superstition ; and under the influence of Lord Surrey 
Italian poetry became once more, as it had been in the days of 
Chaucer, a source of refinement and regeneration to our own. I 
am not indeed disposed to consider the influence of Lord Surrey's 
works upon our language in the very extensive and important 
light in which it is viewed by Dr. Nott. I am doubtful if that 
learned editor has converted many readers to his opinion, that 
Lord Surrey was the first who gave us metrical instead of rhyth- 
mical versification ; for, with just allowance for ancient pronun- 
ciation, the heroic measure of Chaucer will be found in general 
not only to be metrically correct, but to possess considerable 
harmony.* Surrey was not the inventor of our metrical versi- 
fication ; nor had his genius the potent voice and the magic spell 
which rouse all the dormant energies of a language. In certain 
walks of composition, though not in the highest, viz. in the ode, 
elegy, and epitaph, he set a chaste and delicate example ; but he 

„ * [Our father Chaucer hath used the same liberty in feet and measures 
that the Latinists do use : and whosoever do peruse and well consider his 
works, he shall find that, although his lines are not always of one selfsame 
number of syllables, yet, being read by one that hath understanding, the 
longest verse and that which hath most syllables will fall (to the ear) cor- 
respondent unto that which hath in it fewest syllables, shall be found yet 
to consist of words that have such natural sound as may seem equal in 
length to a verse which hath many more syllables of lighter accents. — 
Gascoigne. 

" But if some Englishe woorde herein seem sweet, 
Let Chaucer's name exalted be therefore ; 
Yf any verse doe passe on plesant feet, 
The praise thereof redownd to Petrark's lore. 

Gascoigne, The Grief of Joy. 

It is a disputed question whether Chaucer's verses be rhythmical or 
metrical. I believe them to have been written rhythmically, upon the same 
principle on which Coleridge composed his * Christabel ' — that the number of 
heats or accentuated syllables in every line should be the same, although 
the number of syllables themselves might vary. Verse so composed will 
often be strictly metrical ; and because Chaucer's is frequently so, the argu- 
ment has been raised that it is always so if it be read properly, according to 
the intention of the author. — Southey, Cowperj vol. ii. p. 117.1 



48 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [pabt n. 

was cut off too early in life, and cultivated poetry too slightly, to 
carry the pure stream of his style into the broad and bold chan- 
nels of inventive fiction. Much undoubtedly he did, in giving 
sweetness to our numbers, and in substituting for the rude tauto- 
logy of a former age a style of soft and brilliant ornament, of 
selected expression, and of verbal arrangement, which often 
winds into graceful novelties, though sometimes a little objec- 
tionable from its involution. Our language was also indebted to 
him for the introduction of blank verse. It may be noticed at 
the same time that blank verse, if it had continued to be written 
as Surrey wrote it, would have had a cadence too uniform and 
cautious to be a happy vehicle for the dramatic expression of the 
passions. Grimoald, the second poet who used it after Lord 
Surrey, gave it a little more variety of pauses ; but it was not 
till it had been tried as a measure by several composers that it 
acquired a bold and flexible modulation.* 

The genius of Sir Thomas Wyat was refined and elevated like 
that of his noble friend and contemporary; but his poetry is 
more sententious and sombrous, and in his lyrical effusions he 
studied terseness rather than suavity. Besides these two in- 
teresting men, Sir Francis Bryan, the friend of Wyat, George 
Viscount Rochford, the brother of Anna Boleyne, and Thomas 
Lord Yaux, were poetical courtiers of Henry VIII. To the 
second of these Ritson assigns, though but by conjecture, one of 
the most beautiful and plaintive strains of our elder poetry, * O 
Death, rock me on sleep.' In ToteH's Collection, the earliest 
poetical miscellany in our language, two pieces have been ascribed 
to the same nobleman, the one entitled ' The Assault of Cupid,' 
the other beginning, ' I loath that I did love,' which have been 
frequently reprinted in modern times. 

A poem of uncommon merit in the same collection, which is 
■entitled ' The restless State of a Lover,' and which commences 
with these lines, 

" The sun, when he hath spread his rays, 
And show'd his face ten thousand ways," 

has been ascribed by Dr. Nott to Lord Surrey, but not on de- 
cisive evidence. 

* [Surrey is not a great poet, but he was an influential one ; we owe to 
him the introduction of the Sonnet into our language, and the first taste for 
the Italian poets.] 



PART II.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 49 

111 the reign of Edward VI. the effects of the Reformation 
became visible in our poetry, by blending religious with poetical 
enthusiasm, or rather by substituting the one for the other. The 
national Muse became puritanical, and was not improved by the 
change. Then flourished Sternhold and Hopkins, who, with the 
best intentions and the worst taste, degraded the spirit of Hebrew 
psalmody by flat and homely phraseology ; and, mistaking vul- 
garity for simplicity, turned into bathos what they found sublime. 
Such was the love of versifying holy writ at that period, that the 
Acts of the Apostles were rhymed and set to music by Chris- 
topher Tye.* 

Lord Sackville's name is the next of any importance in our 
poetry that occurs after Lord Surrey's. The opinion of Sir 
Egerton Brydges, with respect to the date of the first appearance 
of Lord Sackville's ' Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates ' 
would place that production, in strictness of chronology, at the 
beginning of Elizabeth's reign. As an edition of the ' Mirror,' 
however, appeared in 1559, supposing Lord Sackville not to have 
assisted in that edition, the first shape of the work must have 
been cast and composed in the reign of Mary. From the date of 

* To the reign of Edward VI. and Mary may be referred two or three 
contributors to the ' Paradise of Dainty Devices ' [1576], who, though their 
lives extended into the reign of Elizabeth, may exemplify the state of poetical 
language before her accession. Among these may be placed Edwards, author 
of the pleasing little piece, ' Amantium irae amoris integratio est,' and 
Hunnis, author of the following song : — 

" When first mine eyes did view and mark 
Thy beauty fair for to behold, 
And when mine ears 'gan first to hark 
The pleasant words that thou me told, 
I would as then I had been free 
From ears to hear, and eyes to see. 

And when in mind I did consent 

To follow thus my fancy's will. 

And when my heart did first relent 

To taste such bait myself to spill, 

I would my heart had been as thine, 
I Or else thy heart as soft as mine. 

( O flatterer false ! thou traitor born. 

What mischief more might thou devise, 

Thau thy dear friend to have in scorn, 

And him to wound in sundry wise ; i 

Which still a friend pretends to be, 

And art not so by proof I see ? 

Fie, fie upon such treachery." 
1 E 



50 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY.. [PAKTn.j^ 

Lord Sackville's birth,* it is also apparent that, although he ,^ 
flourished under Elizabeth, and lived even to direct the council^ Ij 
of James, his prime of life must have been spent, and his poetical ^j 
character formed, in the most disastrous period of the sixteenth -| 
century, a period when we may suppose the cloud that wasj 
passing over the public mind to have cast a gloom on the com- ; 
plexion of its literary taste. During five years of his life, fromi.j 
twenty-five to thirty, the time when sensibility and reflection uj 
meet most strongly. Lord Sackville witnessed the horrors of,, 
Queen Mary's reign ; and I conceive that it is not fanciful to| 
trace in his poetry the tone of an unhappy age. His plan for,^ 
' The Mirror of Magistrates ' is a mass of darkness and de-i 
spondency. He proposed to make the figure of Sorrow intro-,; 
duce us in Hell to every unfortunate great character of English] 
history. The poet, like Dante, takes us to the gates of Hell ; 
but he does not, like the Italian poet, bring us back again. It 
is true that those doleful legends were long continued, during a, 
brighter period ; but this was only done by an inferior order of; 
poets, and was owing to their admiration of Sackville. Dismalf 
as his allegories may be, his genius certainly displays in them 
considerable power. But better times were at hand. In the^ 
reign of Elizabeth the English mind put forth its energies in,- 
every direction, exalted by a purer religion, and enlarged by, 
new views of truth. This was an age of loyalty, adventure, and. 
generous emulation. The chivalrous character was softened by^ 
intellectual pursuits, while the genius of chivalry itself stilL 
lingered, as if unwilling to depart, and paid his last homage to a,.^ 
warlike and female reign. A degree of romantic fancy reinained^ 
in the manners and superstitions of the people ; and allegory|r 
might be said to parade the streets in their public pageants and,' 
festivities. Quaint and pedantic as those allegorical exhibitions, 
might often be, they were nevertheless more expressive of eru-^, 
dition, ingenuity, and moral meaning, than they had been in, 
former times. The philosophy of the highest minds still partookj 
of a visionary character. A poetical spirit infused itself into the 
practical heroism of the age ; and some of the worthies of that 
period seem less like ordinary men than like beings called forth, 
out of fiction, and arrayed in the brightness of her dreams. 

* [1536, if not a little earlier.] 



SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 51 

;j They had " high thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy."* 

! The life of Sir Philip Sydney was poetry put into action. 

! The result of activity and curiosity in the public mind. was to 
complete the revival of classic literature, to increase the im- 

I portation of foreign books, and to multiply translations, from 
which Poetry supplied herself with abundant subjects and ma- 

I terials, and in the use of which she showed a frank and fearless 

i energy, that criticism and satire had not yet acquired power to 

j overawe. Romance came back to us from the southern lan- 
guages, clothed in new luxury by the warm imagination of the 
south. The growth of poetry under such circumstances might 

j indeed be expected to be as irregular as it was profuse. The 
field was open to daring absurdity, as well as to genuine inspi- 

\ ration ; and accordingly there is no period in which the extremes 
of good and bad writing are so abundant. Stanihurst, for in- 
stance, carried the violence of nonsense to a pitch of which there 
is no preceding example. Even late in the reign of Elizabeth, 
Gabriel Harvey was aided and abetted by several men of genius 
in his conspiracy to subvert the versification of the language ; 
and Lyly gained over the court for a time to employ his corrupt 

I jargon called Euphuism. Even Puttenham, a grave and candid 
critic, leaves an indication of crude and puerile taste, when, in a 
laborious treatise on poetry, he directs the composer how to make 
verses beautiful to the eye, by writing them " in the shapes of 
eggs, turbots, fuzees, and lozenges." 

Among the numerous poets belonging exclusively to Elizabeth's 
reign, t Spenser stands without a class and without a rival. To 
proceed from the poets already mentioned to Spenser is certainly 
to pass over a considerable number of years, which are important 
especially from their including the dates of those early attempts 
in the regular drama which preceded the appearance of Shak- 
speare.^ I shall therefore turn back again to that period, after 
having done homage to the name of Spenser. 
He brought to the subject of ' The Fairy Queen ' a new and 

* An expression used by Sir P. Sydney. 

t Of Shakspeare's career a part only belongs to Elizabeth's reign, and of 
jJonson's a still smaller. 

i I The tragedy of ' Gorboduc,' by Sackville and Norton, was represented in 
'1561-2. Spenser's Pastorals were published in 1579, and the three first 
books of ' The Fairy Queen' in 1590. 



52 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part: 

enlarged structure of stanza, elaborate and intricate, but well 
contrived for sustaining the attention of the ear, and concluding 
with a majestic ^cadence. In the other poets of Spenser's age 
we chiefly admire their language when it seems casually tc 
advance into modern polish and succinctness. But the antiquit} 
of Spenser's style has a peculiar charm. The mistaken opinior 
that Ben Jonson censured the antiquity of the diction in * Tht 
Fairy Queen '* has been corrected by Mr. Malone, who pro- 

* Ben Jonson applied his remark to Spenser's Pastorals. [Malone M-a 
very rash in his correction : " Spenser, in affecting the ancients," sa} 
Jonson, " writ no language ; yet I would have him read for his matter, bu 
as Virgil read Ennius." — Works, ix. 215. Jonson's remark is a genera 
censure, not confined to ' The Shepherd's Calendar ' alone. " Some," he says 
in another place (evidently alluding to Spenser), " some seek Chaucerism 
with us which were better expunged and banished.'" — Works, ix. 22. 

If Spenser's language is the language of his age, who among his contem 
poraries is equally obsolete in phraseology ? The letters of the time hav 
none of his words borrowed of antiquity, nor has the printed prose, th 
poetry contradistinguished from the drama, or the drama, which is alway 
the language of the day. His antiquated words were his choice, not hi 
necessity. Has Drayton, or Daniel, or Peele, Marlowe, or Shakspeare th 
obscure words found constantly recurring in Spenser ? " Let others," sa} 
Daniel (the well-languaged Daniel as Coleridge calls him) — 

" Let others sing of knights and paladines, 
In aged accents and untimely words, — 

I sing of Delia in the language of those who are about her and of her day. 
Davenant is express on the point, and speaks of Spenser's new grafts of ol 
withered words and exploded expressions. Surely the writers of Spenser's ow 
age are better authorities than Malone, who read verbally not spiritual!; 
and, emptying a commonplace-book of obsolete words, called upon us to st 
in separate examples what collectively did not then exist. It is easy to firi 
many of Spenser's Chaucerisvis in his contemporaries, but they do not crow 
and characterize their writings ; they tincture, but they do not colour ; the 
are there, but not for ever there. 

Bolton, who wrote in 1622 of language and style, speaks to this point in h 
' Hypercritica.' He is recommending authors for imitation and study- 
" those authors among us whose English hath in my conceit most propriet 
and is nearest to the phrase of court, and to the speech used among ti 
noble and among the better sort in London ; the two sovereign seats, and 
it were Parliament tribunals, to trj- the question in."' " In verse there are^ 1 
he says, " to furnish an English historian with copy and tongue, E( ! 
Spenser's Hymns. I cannot advise the allowance of other of his poeiQ^ 
as for practick English, no more than I can do Jeff. Chaucer, Lydj 
Peirce Ploughman, or Laureat Skelton. It was laid as a fault to 
charge of Sallust, that he used some old outworn words, stolen out of Oiul 
his Books de Originibus. And for an historian in our tongue to apfbI 
the like out of those our poets would be accounted a foul oversight. Tl^^ 
therefore must not be." 

Gray has a letter to prove that the language of the age is never the 



'JPART II.] SIXTEENTH CENTUEY. 63 

nounces it to be exactly that of his contemporaries. His 
^jauthority is weighty ; still, however, without reviving the ex- 
Iploded error respecting Jonson's censure, one might imagine the 

Eifference of Spenser's style from that of Shakspeare's, whom he 
) shortly preceded, to indicate that his gothic subject and story 
jmade him lean towards words of the elder time. At all events, 
'Imuch of his expression is now become antiquated ; though it is 
fceautiful in its antiquity, and, like the moss and ivy on some 
jmajestic building, covers the fabric of his language with romantic 
knd venerable associations. 

I His command .of imagery is wide, easy, and luxuriant. He 
yhrew the soul of harmony into our verse, and made it more 
ifwarmly, tenderly, and magnificently descriptive than it ever was 
'before, or, with a few exceptions, than it has ever been since. 
It must certainly be owned that in description he exhibits nothing 
of the brief strokes and robust power which characterise the 
^ very greatest poets; but we shall nowhere find more airy and 
jexpansive images of visionary things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, 
pT a finer flush in the colours of language, than in this Rubens of 
OEnglish poetry. His fancy teems exuberantly in minuteness of 
icircumstance, like a fertile soil sending bloom and verdure 
through the utmost extremities of the foliage which it nourishes. 
fOn a comprehensive view of the whole work, we certainly miss 
the charm of strength, symmetry, and rapid or interesting pro- 
B^ress; for, though the plan which the poet designed is not com- 
^pleted, it is easy to see that no additional cantos could have 
.rendered it less perplexed.* But still there is a richness in his 

5uage of poetry. Was Spenser behind or Shakspeare in advance ? Stage 
i anguage must necessarily be the language of the time ; and Shakspeare 
^ jives us words pure and neat, yet plain and customary — the style that Ben 
I fonson loved, the eldest of the present and the newest of the past — while 

Spenser fell back on Chaucer as the 

" Well of English undefilde," 

IS he was pleased to express it. (See Warton's Essay on Spenser, vol. i., and 
Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. ii. p. 328.) " The language of Spenser," says 
Hallam, " like that of Shakspeare, is an instrument manufactured for the 
Jake of the work it was to perform."] 

* [Mr. Campbell has given a character of Spenser, not so enthusiastic as 
phat to which I have alluded, but so discriminating, and in general sound, 
'lat I shall take the liberty of extracting it from his ' Specimens of the 
ritish Poets.'— Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. ii. p. 334.] 



54 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [paktb. 






materials, even where their coherence is loose, and their dis- 
position confused. The clouds of his allegory may seem to 
spread into shapeless forms, but they are still the clouds of a 
glowing atmosphere. Though his story grows desultory, the 
sweetness and grace of his manner still abide by him. He is 
like a speaker whose tones continue to be pleasing, though he 
may speak too long ; or like a painter who makes us forget the 
defect of his design by the magic of his colouring. We always 
rise from perusing him with melody in the mind's ear, and with 
pictures of romantic beauty impressed on the imagination.* For 
these attractions ' The Fairy Queen ' will ever continue to be 
resorted to by the poetical student. It is not, however, ven* 
popularly read, and seldom perhaps from beginning to end, even 
by those who can fully appreciate its beauties. This cannot be 
ascribed merely to its presenting a few words which are now 
obsolete ; nor can it be owing, as has been sometimes alleged, to 
the tedium inseparable from protracted allegorj^ Allegorical 
fable may be made entertaining. With every disadvantage oi 
dress and language, the humble John Bunyan has made this 
species of writing very amusing. 

The reader may possibly smile at the names of Spenser and 
Bunyan being brought forward for a moment in comparison ; 
but it is chiefly because the humbler allegorist is so poor in 
language that his power of interesting the curiosity is entitled 
to admiration. We are told by critics that the passions may be 
allegorised, but that Holiness, Justice, and other such thin 
abstractions of the mind, are too unsubstantial machinery for a 
poet ; — yet we all know how well tlie author of ' The Pilgrim's 
Progress ' (and he was a poet though he wrote in prose) has 
managed such abstractions as Mercy and Fortitude. In his art- 
less hands those attributes cease to be abstractions, and become 
our most intimate friends. Had Spenser, with all the wealth 
and graces of his fancy, given his story a more implicit and ani-ji 
mated form, I cannot believe that there was anything in thi| 
nature of his machinery to set bounds to his power of encha 

* [Spenser's allegorical story resembles, methinks, a continuance of < 
traordinary dreams. — Sir W. Davenant. 

After my reading a canto of Spenser two or three days ago to an old 
between 70 and 80, she said that I had been showing her a collection 'of 
pictures. She said very right. — Pope to Spence.] , 

mm 



PART 11.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 55 

I ment. Yet, delicious as his poetry is, his story considered as a 
j romance is obscure, intricate, and monotonous. He translated 
I entire cantos from Tasso, but adopted the wild and irregular 
! manner of Ariosto. The difference is that Spenser appears like 
I a civilized being, slow and sometimes half forlorn, in exploring 
I an uninhabited country, while Ariosto traverses the regions of 
romance like a hardy native of its pathless wilds. Hurd and 
j others, who forbid us to judge of * The Fairy Queen ' by the test 
I of classical unity, and who compare it to a gothic church, or a 
I gothic garden, tell us what is little to the purpose. They cannot 
I persuade us that the story is not too intricate and too diffuse. 
I The thread of the narrative is so entangled, that the poet saw 
the necessity for explaining the design of his poem in prose, in a 
' letter to Sir Walter Ealeigh ; and the perspicuity of a poetical 
design which requires such an explanation may, with no great 
severity, be pronounced a contradiction in terms. It is degrading 
to poetry, we shall perhaps be told, to attach importance to the 
mere story which it relates. Certainly the poet is not a great 
I one whose only charm is the management of his fable ; but 
i where there is a fable, it should be perspicuous. 
i There is one peculiarity in * The Fairy Queen ' which, though 
not a deeply pervading defect, I cannot help considering as an 
incidental blemish- namely, that the allegory is doubled and 
crossed with complimentary allusions to living or recent person- 
ages, and that the agents are partly historical and psirily alle- 
gorical. In some instances the characters have a threefold 
allusion. Gloriana is at once an emblem of true glory, an 
empress of fairy land, and her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. Envy 
is a personified passion, and also a witch, and, with no very 
charitable insinuation, a type of the unfortunate Mary Queen of 
Scots. The knight in dangerous distress is Henry IV. of 
I France ; and the knight of magnificence. Prince Arthur, the 
son of Uther Pendragon, an ancient British hero, is the bulwark 
of the Protestant cause in the Netherlands. Such distraction of 
I allegory cannot well be said to make a fair experiment of its 
i power. The poet may cover his moral meaning under a single 
! and transparent veil of fiction ; but he has no right to muffle it 
I up in foldings which hide the form and symmetry of truth. 
j Upon the whole, if I may presume to measure the imper- 



56 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [past ii. 



fections of so great and venerable a genius, I think we may say 
that, if his popularity be less than universal and complete, it is 
not so much owing to his obsolete language, nor to degeneracy 
of modern taste, nor to his choice of allegory as a subject, as to 
the want of that consolidating and crowning strength which 
alone can establish works of fiction in the favour of all readers 
and of all ages. This want of strength, it is but justice to say, is 
either solely or chiefly apparent when we examine the entire 
structure of his poem, or so large a portion of it as to feel that 
it does not impel or sustain our curiosity in proportion to its 
length. To the beauty of insulated passages who can be blind ? 
The sublime description of " Him who with the Night durst 
rider ' The House of Riches,* ' The Canto of Jealousy,' 'The 
Masque of Cupid,' and other parts, too many to enumerate, are 
so splendid, that after reading them we feel it for the moment 
invidious to ask if they are symmetrically united into a whole. 
Succeeding generations have acknowledged the pathos and rich- 
ness of his strains, and the new contour and enlarged dimensions 
of grace which he gave to English poetry. He is the poetical 
father of a Milton and a Thomson. Gray habitually read him 
when he wished to frame his thoughts for composition ; and there 
are few eminent poets in the language who have not been 
essentially indebted to him. 

" Hither, as to their fountain, other stars 
Repair, and in their urns drew golden light." 

The publication of * The Fairy Queen,' and the commence- 
ment of Shakspeare's dramatic career, may be noticed as con- 
temporary events ; for by no supposition can Shakspeare's ap- 
pearance as a dramatist be traced higher than 1589,* and that 
of Spenser's great poem was in the year 1590. I turn back 
from that date to an earlier period, when the first lineaments of 
our regular drama began to show themselves. 

Before Elizabeth's reign we had no dramatic authors more 
important than Bale and Heywood the Epigrammatist. Bale, 

* [It is clear that before 1591, or even 1592, Shakspeare had no celebrity 
as a -writer of plays ; he must, therefore, have been valuable to the theatre 
chiefly as an actor ; and if this was the case, namely, that he speedily trode 
the stage with some respectability, Mr. Rowe's tradition that he was at first 
admitted in a mean capacity must be taken with a bushel of doubt. — Camp- 
bell, Life of Shakspeare^ 8vo. 1838, p. xxii.] 



PABT II.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 57 

before the titles of tragedy and comedy were well distinguished, 
had written comedies on such subjects as the Resurrection of 
Lazarus, and the Passion and Sepulture of our Lord. He was, 
in fact, the last of the race of mystery- writers. Both Bale 
and Hey wood died about the middle of the sixteenth century, 
but flourished (if such a word can be applied to them) as early 
as the reign of Henry VIII. Until the time of Elizabeth, the 
public was contented with mysteries, moralities, or interludes, 
too humble to deserve the name of comedy. The first of these, 
the mysteries, originated, almost as early as the Conquest, in 
shows given by the church to the people. The moralities,* 
which were chiefly allegorical, probably arose about the middle 
of the fifteenth century ; and the interludes became prevalent 
during the reign of Henry Vlll.t 

Lord Sackville's * Gorboduc,' first represented in 1561-2, and 
Still's '^Gammer Gurton's Needle,' about 1566, were the earliest, 
though faint, draughts of our regular tragedy and comedy. ± 
They did not, however, immediately supersede the taste for the 
allegorical moralities. Sackville even introduced dumb show 
in his tragedy to explain the piece, and he was not the last of 
the old dramatists who did so. One might conceive the explanation 
of allegory by real personages to be a natural complaisance to 
an audience ; but there is something peculiarly ingenious in 
making allegory explain reality, and the dumb interpret for those 
who could speak. In reviewing the rise of the drama, ' Gammer 
Gurton's Needle ' and Sackville's ' Gorboduc ' form convenient 
resting-places for the memory ; but it may be doubted if their 
superiority over the mysteries and moralities be half so great as 

* [Mr. J. Payne Collier observes that the Mysteries should be called 
Miracle-Plays, and the Moralities, Morals or Moral-Plaj-s.] 

t Warton also mentions Eastell, the brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More, 
who was a printer ; but who is believed by the historian of our poetry to 
have been also an author, and to have made the moralities in some degree 
the vehicle of science and philosophy. He published [about 1519] a <ew 
interlude on The Nature of the Four Elements, in which the tracts of 
America lately discovered and the manners of the natives are described. — 
[See Collier's ' Annals,' vol. ii. p. 319.] 

X [An earlier English comedy than 'Gammer Gurton's Needle," viz. 
'Ralph Roister Bolster,* by Nicholas Udall, has been discovered since Mr. 
Campbell wrote this Essay, The only copy known is in the library of 
Eton College, and the only accurate reprint was made for the Shakspeare 
Society by Mr. W. D. Cooper.] 



58 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part ii. 

their real distance from an affecting tragedy or an exhilarating i 
comedy. The main incident in ' Gammer Gurton's Needle ' is • 
the loss of a needle in a man's smallclothes.* ' Gorboduc' has. } 
no interesting plot or impassioned dialogue ; but it dignified the ^ 
stage with moral reflection and stately measure. It first intro- 
duced blank verse instead of ballad rhymes in the drama. Gas- - 
coigne gave a further popularity to blank verse by his paraphrase \ 
of 'Jocasta,' from Euripides, which appeared in 1566. The same \ 
author's ' Supposes,' translated from Ariosto, was our earliest 
prose comedy. Its dialogue is easy and spirited. Edwards's fe 
* Palamon and Arcite ' was acted in the same year, to the great i 
admiration of Queen Elizabeth, who called the author into her 
presence, and complimented him on having justly drawn the 
character of a genuine lover. 

Ten tragedies of Seneca were translated into English verse at 
different times, and by different authors, before the year 1581. 
One of these translators was Alexander Neyvile, afterwards 
secretary to Archbishop Parker, whose ' (Edipus ' came out as i 
early as 1563 ; and though he was but a youth of nineteen, his ,- 
style has considerable beauty. The following lines, which open ^ 
the first act, may serve as a specimen : — 

" The night is gone, and dreadful day begins at length t' appear, 
And Phoebus, all bedimm'd with clouds, himself aloft doth rear; 
And, gliding forth, with deadly hue and doleful blaze in skies, 
Doth bear great terror and dismay to the beholder's eyes. 
Now shall the houses void be seen, with plague devoured quite. 
And slaughter which the night hath made shall day bring forth to light. 
Doth any man in princely thx'ones rejoice ? O brittle joy ! 
How many ills, how fair a face, and yet how much annoy, 
In thee doth lurk, and hidden lies — what heaps of endless strife ! 
They judge amiss that deem the prince to have the happy life." 

In 1568 was produced the tragedy of * Tancred and Sigis- 

munda,' by Robert Wilmot and four other students of the Inner 

* [" It is a piece of low humour ; the whole jest turning upon the loss 
and the recovery of the needle with which Gammer Gurton was to repair || 
the 'breeches of her man Hodge ; but in point of manners it is a great " 
curiosity, as the curta supellex of our ancestors is scarcely anjwhere so '" 
well described." . . . . " The unity of time, place, and action, is observed 
through the play, with an accuracy of which France might be jealous." . . . 
" It is remarkable that the earliest English tragedy'' (alluding to 'Gorbo- 
duc ') " and comedy are both works of considei-able merit ; that each par- 
takes of the distinct character of its class ; that the tragedy is without 
intermixture of comedy — the comedy without any intermixture of tragedy." 
—Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 333. J 



PART II.] SIXTEENTH CENTUEY. 59 

Temple. It is reprinted in Reed's plays ; but that reprint is taken 
not from the first edition, but from one greatly polished and 
amended in 1592.* Considered as a piece coming within the 
verge of Shakspeare's age, it ceases to be wonderful. Immedi- 
ately subsequent to these writers we meet with several obscure 
and uninteresting dramatic names, among which is that of Whet- 
stone, the author of ' Promos and Cassandra' [1578], in which 
piece there is a partial anticipation of the plot of Shakspeare's 
* Measure for Measure.' Another is that of Preston, whose tragedy 
of ' Cambyses 'f is alluded to by Shakspeare, when Falstaff calls 
for a cup of sack, that he may weep " in King Cambyses' vein." J 
There is, indeed, matter for weeping in this tragedy ; for, in the 
course of it, an elderly gentleman is flayed alive. To make the 
skinnino- more pathetic, his own son is witness to it, and ex- 
claims, — 

" What child is he of Nature's mould could bide the same to see, 
His father fleaed in this wise ? O how it grieveth me !" 

It may comfort the reader to know that this theatric decortica- 
tion was meant to be allegorical ; and we may believe that it 
was performed with no degree of stage illusion that could deeply 
affect the spectator. § 

In the last twenty years of the sixteenth century we come to 
a period when the increasing demand for theatrical entertain- 
ments produced play- writers by profession. The earliest of these 
appears to have been George Peele, who was the city poet and 
conductor of the civic pageants. His ' Arraignment of Paris ' 
came out in 1584. Nash calls him an Atlas in poetry. Unless 

* \_Newly revived, and polished according to the decorum of these days. 
That is, as Mr. Collier supposes, by the removal of the rhymes to a blank- 
verse fashion.] 

t In the title-page it is denominated " A lamentable Tragedy, mixed 
full of pleasant Mirth." 

X [The Tamerlanes and Tamer-chamsof the late age had nothing in them 
but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them tQ the 
ignorant gapers. — Ben Jonson. (Gifford, vol. ix. p. 180.) 

I suspect that Shakspeare confounded King Cambyses with King Darius. 
Falstaffs solemn fustian bears not the slightest resemblance, either in metre 
or in matter, to the vein of King Cambyses. Kyng Daryus, whose doleful 
strain is here burlesqued, was a pithie and plesaunt entertude, printed about 
the middle of the sixteenth century. — GiflFord. Note on Jonson's ' Poetaster,' 
Works, vol. ii. p. 455.] 

§ [The stage direction excites a smile : Flea him with a false skin.'] 



60 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part ii. 

we make allowance for his antiquity, the expression will appear 
hyperbolical ; but, with that allowance, we may justly cherish 
the memory of Peele as the oldest genuine dramatic poet of our 
language. His ' David and Bethsabe ' is the earliest fountain of 
pathos and harmony that can be traced in our dramatic poetry. 
His fancy is rich and his feeling tender, and his conceptions 
of dramatic character have no inconsiderable mixture of solid 
veracity and ideal beauty. There is no such sweetness of versi- 
fication and imagery to be" found in our blank verse anterior to 
Shakspeare.* David's character — the traits both of his guilt 
and sensibility — his passion for Bethsabe — his art in inflaming 
the military ambition of Urias — and his grief for Absalom, are 
delineated with no vulgar skill. The luxuriant image of Beth- 
sabe is introduced by these lines : — 

" Come, gentle Zephyr, trick'd with those perfumes 
That erst in Eden sweeten' d Adam's love. 
And stroke my bosom with thy gentle fan : 
This shade, sun-proof, is yet no proof for thee. 
Thy body, smoother than this waveless spring. 
And purer than the substance of the same. 
Can creep through that his lances cannot pierce. 
Thou and thy sister, soft and sacred Air, 
Goddess of life, and governess of health. 
Keeps every fountain fresh, and arbour sweet. 
No brazen gate her passage can refuse, 
Nor bushy thicket bar thy subtle breath : 
Then deck thee with thy loose delightsome robes, 
And on thy wings bring delicate perfumes. 
To play the wanton with us through the leaves. 
" David. What tunes, what words, what looks, what wonders 
pierce 
My soul, incensed with a sudden fire ? 
What tree, what shade, what spring, what paradise, 
Enjoys the beauty of so fair a dame ? 
Fair Eva, placed in perfect happiness, 
Lending her praise-notes to the liberal heavens, 
Strook with the accents of archangels' tunes, 
Wrought not more pleasure to her husband's thoughts. 
Than this fair woman's words and notes to mine. 
May that sweet plain, that bears her pleasant weight, 



* [Mr. Dyce, in his edition of Peele, has quoted this passage from Mr. 
Campbell — " a critic," he styles him, " who is by no means subject to the 
pardonable weakness of discovering beauties in every writer of the olden 
time." — p. xxxviii. 

It is quoted, too, by Mr, Hallam {Lit. Hist., vol. ii. p. 378), who concurs 
with Mr. Collier in thinking these compliments excessive.] 



PART II.] SIXTEENTH CENTUKY. Gl 

Be still enamell'd ^iih discolour'd flowers ; 
That precious fount bear saud of purest gold ; 
And, for the pebble, let the silver streams 
Play upon rubies, sapphires, chrysolites ; 
The brims let be embraced with golden curls 
Of moss, that sleeps with sound the waters make ; 
For joy to feed the fount with their recourse 
Let all the grass that beautifies her bower 
Bear manna every morn instead of dew ! " 
***** 

Joab thus describes the glory of David : — 

*' Beauteous and bright is he among the tribes, 
As when the sun, attired in glistering robe, 
Comes dancing from his oriental gate. 
And, bridegroom-like, hurls through the gloomy air 
His radiant beams : such doth King David show, 
Crown'd with the honour of his enemies' town, 
Shining in riches like the firmament, 
The starry vault that overhangs the earth; 
So looketh David, King of Israel." 

At the conclusion of the tragedy, when David gives way to 
his grief for Absalom, he is roused with great dignity and energy 
by the speech of Joab. When informed^ by Joab of the death 
of his son, David exclaims, — 

" David. Thou man of blood ! thou sepulchre of death ! 
Whose marble breast entombs my bowels quick. 
Did I not charge thee, nay, entreat thy hand, 
Even for my sake, to spare my Absalom ? 
And hast thou now, in spite of David's health, 
And scorn to do my heart some happiness. 
Given him the sword, and spilt his purple soul ? 

" Joab. What ! irks it David that he victor breathes, 
That Juda, and the fields of Israel 
Should cleanse their faces from their children's blood ? 
What ! art thou weary of thy royal rule ? 
Is Israel's throne a serpent in thine eyes, 
And he that set thee there so far from thanks, 
That thou must curse his servant for his sake ? 
Hast thou not said, that, as the morning light, 
The cloudless morning, so should be thine house. 
And not as flowers, by the brightest rain, 
Which grow up quickly, and as quickly fade ? 
Hast thou not said, the wicked are as thorns. 
That cannot be preserved with the hand ; 
And that the man shall touch them must be arm'd 
With coats of iron, and garments made of steel, 
Or with the shaft of a defenced spear ? 
And art thou angry he is now cut ofl". 
That led the guiltless swarming to their deaths, 
And was more wicked than an host of men? 



62 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part n. 

Advance thee from thy melancholy den, 

And deck thy body with thy blissful robes, 

Or, by the Lord that sways the heaven, I swear, 

I '11 lead thine armies to another king, 

Shall cheer them for their princely chivalry, 

And not sit daunted, frowning in the dark, 

When his fair looks, with oil and wine refresh'd, 

Should dart into their bosoms gladsome beams. 

And fill their stomachs with triumphant feasts ; 

That, when elsewhere stern War shall sound his trump, 

And call another battle to the field. 

Fame still may bring thy valiant soldiers home. 

And for their service happily confess 

She wanted worthy trumps to sound their prowess : 

Take thou this course, and live ; — Refuse, and die." 

Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd, Nash, Lodge, and Marlowe, were 
the other writers for our early stage, a part of whose career pre- 
ceded that of Shakspeare.* Lyly> whose dramatic language is 

* [An interesting subject of inquiry in Shakspeare's literary history is 
the state of our dramatic poetry when be began to alter and originate Eng- 
lish plays. Before his time mere mysteries and miracle-plays, in which 
Adam and Eve appeared naked, in which the devil displayed his horns and 
tail, and in which Noah's wife boxed the patriarch's ears before entering 
the ark, had fallen comparatively into disuse, after a popularity of four 
centuries ; and in the course of the sixteenth century the clergy were for- 
bidden by orders from Eome to perform in them. Meanwhile " moralities," 
which had made their appearance about the middle of the fifteenth century, 
were also hastening their retreat, as well as those pageants and masques in 
honour of royalty, which nevertheless aided the introduction of the drama. 
But we owe our first regular dramas to the universities, the inns of court, 
and public seminaries. The scholars of these establishments engaged in 
free translations of classical dramatists, though with so little taste, that 
Seneca was one of their favourites. They caught the coldness of that 
model, however, without the feeblest trace of his slender graces ; they looked 
at the ancients without understanding them ; and they brought to their plots . 
neither unity, design, nor affecting interest. There is a general similarity 
among all the plays that preceded Shakspeare in their ill-conceived plots, 
in the bombast and dulness of tragedy, and in the vulgar buffoonery of 
comedy. 

Of our great poet's immediate predecessors, the most distinguished were 
Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd, Nash, Lodge, and Marlowe. Lyly was not 
entirely devoid of poetry, for we have some pleasing lyrical verses by him ; 
but in the drama he is cold, mythological, and conceited, and he even pol- 
luted for a time the juvenile age of our literature with his abominable Eu- 
phuism. Peele has left some melodious and fanciful passages in his ' David 
and Bethsabe.' Greene is not unjustly praised for his comedy ♦ Friar Bacon 
and Friar Bungay.' Kyd's ' Spanish Tragedy ' was at first admired, but 
subsequently quoted only for its samples of the mock sublime. Nash wrote 
no poetry, except for the stage ; but he is a poor dramatic poet, though his 
prose satires are remarkably powerful. Lodge was not much happier on 
the stage than Nash ; his prose works are not very valuable ; but he wrote 



1 .iRT II.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 63 

prose, has traits of genius which we should not expect from his 
generally depraved taste, and he has several graceful intersper- 
sions of " sweet lyric song." But his manner, on the whole, is 
stilted. " Brave Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,"* of 
whose " mighty Muse " Ben Jonson himself speaks reverentially, 
had powers of no ordinary class, and even ventured a few steps 
into the pathless sublime. But his pathos is dreary, and the 
terrors of his Muse remind us more of Minerva's gorgon than 
her countenance. The first sober and cold school of tragedy, 
which began with Lord Sackville^s ' Gorboduc,' was succeeded by 
one 'of headlong extravagance. Kyd's bombast was proverbial 
in his own day. With him the genius of Tragedy might be said 
to have run mad ; and, if we may judge of one work, the joint 
production of Greene and Lodge, to have hardly recovered her 
wits in the company of those authors. The piece to which I 
allude is entitled ' A Looking-glass for London' (1594). There 
the ' Tamburlane' of Kyd is fairly rivalled in rant and blasphemy 
by the hero, Rasni, King of Nineveh, who boasts 

*' Great Jewry's God, that foil'd stout Benhadab, 
Could not rebate the strength that Rasni brought ; 
For be he God in heaven, yet viceroys know 
Rasni is God on earth, and none but he." 

In the course of the play the imperial swaggerer marries his 
own sister, who is quite as consequential a character as himself; 
but, finding her struck dead by lightning, he deigns to espouse 
her lady-in-waiting, and is finally converted, after his wedding, 
by Jonah, who soon afterwards arrives at Nineveh. It would 
be perhaps unfair, however, to assume this tragedy as a fair test 
of the dramatic talents of either Greene or Lodge. Eitson re- 
commended the dramas of Greene as well worthy of being col- 
one satire in verse of considerable merit, and various graceful little lyrics. 
Marlowe was the only great man among Shakspeare's precursors ; his con- 
ceptions were strong and original ; his intellect grasped his subject as a 
whole : no doubt he dislocated the thews of his language by overstrained 
efforts at the show of strength, but he delineated character with a degree of 
truth unknown to his predecessors : his ' Edward the Second ' is pathetic, 
and his ' Faustus ' has real grandeur. If Marlowe had lived, Shakspeare 
might have had something like a competitor. — Campbell, Life of Shakspeare , 
p. xxiii.] 
* [Drayton.] 



64 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part n. 

____^ ..^___ ' 

lected. The taste of that antiquary was not exquisite, but his 
knowledge may entitle his opinion to consideration.* i 

Among these precursors of Shakspeare we may trace, in Peele 
and Marlowe, a pleasing dawn of the drama, though it was by 
no means a dawn corresponding to so bright a sunrise as the 
appearance of his mighty genius. He created our romantic 
drama, or, if the assertion is to be qualified, it requires but a ^; 
small qualification.! There were, undoubtedly, prior occupants ,j^ 
of the dramatic ground in our language; but they appear only, 
like unprosperous settlers on the patches and skirts of a wilder- 1. 
ness, which he converted into a garden. He is, therefore, never ,; 
compared with his native predecessors. Criticism goes back, for i 
names worthy of being put in competition with his, to the first i, 
great masters of dramatic invention ; and even in the points of ; 
dissimilarity between them and him discovers some of the highest | 
indications of his genius. Compared with the classical com- 

* [His Dramas and Poems were printed together in 1831 by Mr. Dyce. 
" In richness of fancy, Greene," says Mr, Dyce, *' is inferior to Peele ; and, 
with the exception of his amusing comedy ' Friar Bacon and Friar Bun- 
gay,' there is, perhaps, but little to admire in his dramatic productions."] 

f [" Untaught, unpractised, in a barbarous age, 
I found not, but created first the stage ; 
And if 1 drain 'd no Greek or Latin store, 
'Twas that my own abundance gave me more." 

Dryden, of Shakspeare. 

The English stage might be considered equally without rule and without 
model when Shakspeare arose. The effect of the genius of an individual 
upon the taste of a nation is mighty ; but that genius, in its turn, is formed i 
according to the opinions prevalent at the period when it comes into exist- 
ence. Such was the case with Shakspeare. Had he received an education 
more extensive, and possessed a taste refined by the classical models, it is 
probable that he also, in admiration of the ancient drama, might have mis- 
taken the form for the essence, and subscribed to those rules which had 
produced such masterpieces of art. Fortunately for the full exertion of a 
genius, as comprehensive and versatile as intense and powerful, Shakspeare 
had no access to any models of which the commanding merit might have 
controlled and limited his own exertions. He followed the path which a J 
nameless crowd of obscure writers had trodden before him ; but he moved J 
in it with the grace and majestic step of a being of a superior order, and } 
vindicated for ever the British theatre from a pedantic restriction to classical 
rule. Nothing went before Shakspeare which in any respect was fit to fix . 
and stamp the character of a national drama ; and certainly no one will 
succeed him capable of establishing, by mere authority, a form more re- 
stricted than that which^ Shakspeare used. — Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Pr. 
Works, vol. iii. p. 336.] 



P.VRT II.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 65 

posers of antiquity, he is to our conceptions nearer the character 
of a universal poet ; more acquainted with man in the real world, 
and more terrific and bewitching in the preternatural. He ex- 
panded the magic circle of the drama beyond the limits that 
belonged to it in antiquity ; made it embrace more time and 
locality ; filled it with larger business and action — with vicis- 
situdes of gay and serious emotion, which classical taste had kept 
divided — with characters which developed humanity in stronger 
lights and subtler movements — and with a language more wildly, 
more playfully diversified by fancy and passion, than was ever 
spoken on any stage. Like Nature herself, he presents alterna- 
tions of the gay and the tragic ; and his mutability, like the 
suspense and precariousness of real existence, often deepens the 
force of our impressions. He converted imitation into illusion. 
To say that, magician as he was, he was not faultless, is only to 
recall the flat and stale truism that everything human is imper- 
fect. But how to estimate his imperfections!* To praise him 
is easy — in facili causa cuivis licet esse diserto — but to make 
a special, full, and accurate estimate of his imperfections would 
require a delicate and comprehensive discrimination and an 
authority which are almost as seldom united in one man as the 
powers of Shakspeare himself. He is the poet of the world. 
The magnitude of his genius puts it beyond all private opinion 
to set defined limits to the admiration which is due to it. We 
know, upon the whole, that the sum of blemishes to be deducted 
from his merits is not great, f and we should scarcely be thankful 

* [He (Shakspeare) was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient 
poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of 
nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously but 
luckily ; when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. 
Those who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the greater com- 
mendation ; he was naturally learned ; he needed not the spectacles of books 
to read nature ; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he 
is everywhere alike ; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him 
■with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid ; his comic 
wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he 
is always great when great occasion is presented to him ; no man can say 
he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high 
above the rest of poets — 

Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi. 

Dryden.] 

t [If Shakspeare's embroideries were burnt down, there would still be 
silver at the bottom of the melting-pot. — Dryden, Malone, vol. ii. p. 295.] 

F 



66 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETEY. [part ii. 

to one who should be anxious to make it. No other poet tri- 
umphs so anomalously over eccentricities and peculiarities in 
composition which would appear blemishes in others ; so that his , 
blemishes and beauties have an affinity which we are jealous of 
trusting any hand with the task of separating. We dread the ] 
interference of criticism wdth a fascination so often inexplicable \j 
by critical laws, and justly apprehend that any man in standing j 
between us and Shakspeare may show for pretended spots upon 
his disk only the shadows of his own opacity. 

Still it is not a part even of that enthusiastic creed to be- 
lieve that he has no excessive mixture of the tragic and comic, no 
blemishes of language in the elliptical throng and impatient 
pressure of his images, no irregularities of plot and action, 
which another Shakspeare would avoid, if " nature had not j 
broken the mould in which she made him," or if he should come 
back into the world to blend experience with inspiration.* 

The bare name of the dramatic unities is apt to excite re- 
volting ideas of pedantry, arts of poetry, and French criticism. 
With none of these do I wish to annoy the reader. I conceive 
that it may be said of those unities as of fire and water, that they 
are good servants but bad masters. In perfect rigour they were 
never imposed by the Greeks, and they would be still heavier 
shackles if they were closely riveted on our own drama. It w^ould 
be worse than useless to confine dramatic action literally and ^'i 
immoveably to one spot, or its imaginary time to the time ia ^j 
which it is represented. On the other hand, dramatic time and ^y 
place cannot surely admit of indefinite expansion. It would be 
better, for the sake of illusion and probability,! to change the 

* [" There is not a doubt that he lighted up his glorious fancy at the lamp 
of classical mythology : — 

Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself; 
An eye like Mars to threaten and command ; 
A station like the herald Mercury, 
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill — 

Who can read these lines without perceiving that Shakspeare had imbibed * 
a deeper feeling of the beauty of Pagan mythology than a thousand pedants 
could have imbibed in their whole lives ?" — Campbell, Life of Shakspeare, 
p. xvi.] 

t Dr. Johnson has said, with regard to local unity in the drama, that we 
can as easily imagine ourselves in one place as another. So we can, at the 
beginning of a play ; but having taken our imaginary station with the poet 



! PART II.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 67 

1 

1 

j scene from Windsor to London, than from London to Pekin; it 

' would look more like reality if a messenger, who went and re- 
j turned in the course of the play, told us of having performed a 
' journey of ten or twenty, rather than of a thousand miles ; and 
I if the spectator had neither that, nor any other circumstance, 
; to make him ask how so much could be performed in so short 
a time. 

In an abstract view of dramatic art, its principles must appear 
to lie nearer to unity than to the opposite extreme of disunion, in 
our conceptions of time and place. Giving up the law of unity 
in its literal rigour, there is still a latitude of its application 
which may preserve proportion and harmony in the drama.* 

The brilliant and able Schlegel has traced the principles of 
what he denominates the romantic, in opposition to the classical 
drama ; and conceives that Shakspeare's theatre, when tried by 
those principles, will be found not to have violated any of the 
unities, if they are largely and liberally understood. I have no 
doubt that Mr. Schlegel's criticism will be found to have proved 
this point in a considerable number of the works of our mighty 
poet. There are traits, however, in Shakspeare, which, I must 
own, appear to my humble judgment incapable of being illus- 
trated by any system or principles of art. I do not allude to his 
historical plays, which, expressly from being historical, may be 
called a privileged class. But in those of purer fiction, it strikes 
me that there are licences conceded indeed to imagination's 
"chartered libertine," but anomalous with regard to anything 
which can be recognised as principles in dramatic art. When 
Perdita, for instance, grows from the cradle to the marriage altar 
in the course of the play, I can perceive no unity in the design 
of the piece, and take refuge in the supposition of Shakspeare's 
genius triumphing and trampling over art. Yet Mr. Schlegel, 
as far as I have observed, makes no exception to this breach of 

: i in one country, I do not believe with Dr. Johnson that we change into a 
different one with perfect facility to the imagination. Lay the first act 
1 in Europe, and we surely do not naturally expect to find the second in 
! America. 

I * [For some admirable remarks on dramatic unities, see Scott's 'Essay on 
! the Drama' (Misc. Pr. Worhs, vol. vi. p. 298-321). Dr. Johnson has 
j numerous obligations to an excellent paper by Farquhar — a fact not gene- 
I rally enough known.] 

F 2 



&8 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part n. 

temporal unity ; nor, in proving Shakspeare a regular artist oa 
a mighty scale, does he deign to notice this circumstance, even as ' 
the ultima Thule of his licence.* If a man contends that' 
dramatic laws are all idle restrictions, I can understand him ; 
or if he says that Perdita's growth on the stage is a trespass on 
art, but that Shakspeare's fascination over and over again redeems ' 
it, I can both understand and agree with him. But when I am; 
left to infer that all this is right on romantic principles, I con- 
fess that those principles become too romantic for my conception. 
If Perdita may be born and married on the stage, why may notj 
Webster's Duchess of Malfi lie-in between the acts, and produce, 
a fine family of tragic children ? Her Grace actually does so 
in Webster's drama, and he is a poet of some genius, though it' 
is not quite so sufficient as Shakspeare's to give a " sweet ob- 
livious antidote" to such "perilous stuff." It is not, however, 
either in favour of Shakspeare's or of Webster's genius that we^ 
shall be called on to make allowance, if we justify in the drama^ 
the lapse of such a number of years as may change the apparent'' 
identity of an individual. If romantic unity is to be so largelyi 
interpreted, the old Spanish dramas, where youths grow grey-^ 
beards upon the stage, the mysteries and moralities, and produc- 
tions teeming with the wildest anachronism, might all come inj^ 
with their grave or laughable claims to romantic legitimacy. 

" Nam sic 
Et Laberi mimos ut pulchra poemata mirer." — Hor. 

On a general view, I conceive it may be said that Shakspeare 
nobly and legitimately enlarged the boundaries of time and) 
place in the drama ; but in extreme cases, I would rather agre® 
with Cumberland, to waive all mention of his name in speakingf 

* l^Mitis. How comes it that in some one play we see so many seas,! 
countries, and kingdoms, passed over with such admirable dexterity ? 

Cordatns. O, that but shows how well the authors can travel in their 
vocation, and outrun the apprehension of their auditory. — Ben Jonson, 
J^very Man out of his Humour. 

This was said in 1599, and at The Globe, when Shakspeare, that verjTj 
year, perhaps the performance before, had crossed the seas in his chor 
from England to France, and from France to England, with admiral 
dexterity. Jonson wrote to recommend his own unities, and to instruct ' 
audience ; not, as the Shakspeare commentators would have us believe, 
abuse Shakspeare, in the very theatre iu which he was a large sharer, 
Unquestionably the main-stay.] 



PART II.] SIXTEENTH CENTUEY. 69 

of dramatic laws, than accept of those licences for art which are 
not art, and designate irregularity by the name of order. 

There were other poets who started nearly coeval with Ben 
Jonson in the attempt to give a classical form to our drama. 
Daniel, for instance, brought out his tragedy of ' Cleopatra ' in 
1594 ; but his elegant genius wanted the strength requisite for 
great dramatic efforts. Still more unequal to the task was the 
Earl of Sterline, who published his cold " monarchic tragedies" 
in 1604. The triumph of founding English classical comedy 
belonged exclusively to Jonson. In his tragedies it is remark- 
able that he freely dispenses with the unities, though in those 
tragedies he brings classical antiquity in the most learnedly 
authenticated traits before our eyes. The vindication of his 
great poetic memory forms an agreeable contrast in modern 
criticism with the bold bad things which used to be said of him 
in a former period ; as when Young compared him to a blind 
Samson, who pulled down the ruins of antiquity on his head and 
buried his genius beneath them.* Hurd, though he inveighed 
against the too abstract conception of his characters, pronouncing 
them rather personified humours than natural beings, did him, 
nevertheless, the justice to quote one short and lovely passage 
from one of his masques, and the beauty of that passage pro- 
bably turned the attention of many readers to his then neglected 
compositions. f It is, indeed, but one of the many beauties 
which justify all that has been said of Jonson's lyrical powers. 

* ['* If the ancients," says Headley, " were to reclaim their own, Jonson 
would not have a rag to cover his nakedness :" a remark that called a taunt- 
ing reply from Gifford in one of his most bitter moods. Dryden has beau- 
tifully said of Jonson that you may track him everywhere in the snow of 
the ancients.] 

t Namely, the song of Night, in the masque of ' The Vision of Delighf : — 

" Break, Phant'sie, from thy cave of cloud." 

[His lyrical poetry forms, perhaps, the most delightful part of his poetical 
character. In songs, and masques, and interludes, his fancy has a wildness 
and a sweetness that we should not expect from the severity of his dramatic 
taste. It cannot be said, indeed, that he is always free from metaphysical 
conceit, but his language is weighty with thought, and polished with elegance. 
Upon the whole, his merits, after every fair deduction, leave him in posses- 
sion of a high niche in our literature, and entitle him to be ranked (next to 
Shakspeare) as the most important benefactor of our early drama. — Camp- 
bell, article ' Jonson^ in Brewster's Encyclopedia.'] 



70 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part ii. 

In that fanciful region of the drama (the masque) he stands as 
pre-eminent as in comedy ; or, if he can be said to be rivalled, 
it is only by Milton. And our surprise at the wildness and 
sweetness of his fancy in one walk of composition is increased by 
the stern and rigid (sometimes rugged) air of truth which he 
preserves in the other. In the regular drama he certainly holds 
up no romantic mirror to nature. His object was to exhibit 
human characters at once strongly comic and severely and in- 
structively true— to nourish the undef standing, while he feasted 
the sense of ridicule. He is more anxious for verisimilitude 
than even for comic effect. He understood the humours and 
peculiarities of his species scientifically, and brought them 
forward in their greatest contrasts and subtlest modifications. 
If Shakspeare carelessly scattered illusion, Jonson skilfully pre- 
pared it. This is speaking of Jonson in his happiest manner. 
There is a great deal of harsh and sour fruit in his miscellaneous 
poetry. It is acknowledged that in the drama he frequently 
overlabours his delineation of character, and wastes it tediously 
upon uninteresting humours and peculiarities. He is a moral 
painter, who delights over much to show his knowledge of 
moral anatomy. Beyond the pale of his three great dramas, 
' The Fox,' ' The Epicene, or Silent Woman,' and * The Alche- 
mist,' it would not be difficult to find many striking exceptions 
to that love of truth and probability which, in a general view, 
may be regarded as one of his best characteristics. Even within 
that pale, namely, in his masterly character of Yolpone, one is 
struck with what, if it be not an absolute breach, is at least a 
very bold stretch, of probability. It is true that Volpone is 
altogether a being daringly conceived ; and those who think, 
that art spoiled the originality of Jonson may well rectify their 
opinion by considering the force of imagination which it re- 
quired to concentrate the traits of such a character as " the 
Fox ;" not to speak of his Mosca, who is the phoenix of all 
parasites. Volpone himself is not like the common misers of 
comedy — a mere money-loving dotard — a hard shrivelled old 
mummy, with no other spice than his avarice to preserve him ; 
he is a happy villain — a jolly misanthrope — a little god in his 
own selfishness ; and Mosca is his priest and prophet. Vigorous 
and healthy, though past the prime of life, he hugs himself in 



PART II.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 71 

his arch humour, his successful knavery and imposture, his 
sensuality and his wealth, with an unhallowed relish of selfish 
existence. His passion for wealth seems not to be so great as 
his delight in gulling the human " vultures and gorecrows" who 
flock round him at the imagined approach of his dissolution — the 
speculators who put their gold, as they conceive, into his dying 
gripe, to be returned to them a thousand-fold in his will. Yet 
still, after this exquisite rogue has stood his trial in a sweat of 
agony at the scrutineum^ and blessed his stars at having narrowly 
escaped being put to the torture, there is something (one would 
think) a little too strong for probability in that mischievous 
mirth and love of tormenting his own dupes, which bring him, 
by his own folly, a second time within the fangs of justice, 
' The Fox ' and ' The Alchemist ' seem to have divided Jonson's 
admirers as to which of them may be considered his masterpiece. 
In confessing my partiality to the prose comedy of * The Silent 
"Woman,' considered merely as a comedy, I am by no means 
forgetful of the rich eloquence which poetry imparts to the two 
others. But ' The Epicene,' in my humble apprehension, ex- 
hibits Jonson's humour in the most exhilarating perfection.* 
With due admiration for 'The Alchemist,' I cannot help 
thinking the jargon of the chemical jugglers, though it displays 
the learning of the author, to be tediously profuse. ' The Fox ' 
rises to something higher than comic eiFect. It is morally im- 
pressive. It detains us at particular points in serious terror and 
suspense. But ' The Epicene ' is purely facetious. I know 
not, indeed, why we should laugh more at the sufferings of 
Morose than at those of the sensualist Sir Epicure Mammon, 
who deserves his miseries much better than the rueful and piti- 
able Morose. Yet so it is, that, though the feelings of pathos 
and ridicule seem so widely different, a certain tincture of the 
pitiable makes comic distress more irresistible. Poor Morose 

* [The plot of ' The Fox' is admirably conceived ; and that of ' The Alche- 
mist,' though faulty in the conclusion, is nearly equal to it. In the two 
comedies of * Every Man in his Humour,' and ' Every Man out of his 
Humour,' the plot deserves much less praise, and is deficient at once in in- 
terest and unity of action ; but in that of ' The Silent Woman,' nothing can 
exceed the art with which the circumstance upon which the conclusion 
turns is, until the very last scene, concealed from the knowledge of the reader, 
while he is tempted to suppose it constantly within his reach. — Sir Walter 
Scott, Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 341.] 



72 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part ii. 

suffers what the fancy of Dante could not have surpassed in 
description, if he had sketched out a ludicrous Purgatory. A 
lover of quiet — a man exquisitely impatient of rude sounds and 
loquacity — who lived in a retired street — who barricadoed his 
doors with mattresses to prevent disturbance to his ears — and who 
married a wife because he could with difficulty prevail upon her 
to speak to him — has hardly tied the fatal knot when his house 
is tempested by female eloquence, and the marriage of him who 
had pensioned the city-wakes to keep away from his neighbour- 
hood is celebrated by a concert of trumpets. He repairs to a 
court of justice to get his marriage if possible dissolved, but is 
driven back in despair by the intolerable noise of the court. 
For this marriage how exquisitely we are prepared by the scene 
of courtship ! When Morose questions his intended bride about 
her likings and habits of life, she plays her part so hypocritically, 
that he seems for a moment impatient of her reserve, and with 
the most ludicrous cross feelings wishes her to speak more 
loudly, that he may have a proof of her taciturnity from her own 
lips ; but, recollecting himself, he gives way to the rapturous 
satisfaction of having found a silent woman, and exclaims to 
Cutbeard, " Go thy ways and get me a clergyman presently, 
with a soft low voice, to marry us, and pray him he will not be 
impertinent, but brief as he can." 

The art of Jonson was not confined to the cold observation of 
the unities of place and time, but appears in the whole adaptation 
of his incidents and characters to the support of each other. 
Beneath his learning and art he moves with an activity which 
may be compared to the strength of a man who can leap and 
bound under the heaviest armour.* 

The works of Jonson bring us into the seventeenth century ; 
and early in that century, our language, besides the great names 
already mentioned, contains many other poets whose works may 

* [He (Jonson) was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and 
Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them ; there is scarce a poet or his- 
torian among the Roman authors of those times whom he has not translated 
in ' Sejanus' and ' Catiline.' But he has done his robberies so openly, that one 
may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a 
monarch, and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him. 
With the spoils of these writers he so represented old Rome to us in its rites, 
ceremonies, and customs, that if one of their poets had written either of his 
tragedies we had seen less of it than in him. — Dryden.] 



PART u.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 73 

be read with a pleasure independent of the interest which we 
take in their antiquity. 

Drayton and Daniel, though the most opposite in the cast of 
their genius, are pre-eminent in the second poetical class of their 
age for their common merit of clear and harmonious diction. 
Drayton is prone to Ovidian conceits, but he plays with them so 
gaily, that they almost seem to become him as if natural. His 
feeling is neither deep, nor is the happiness of his fancy of long 
continuance, but its short April gleams are very beautiful. His 
' Legend of the Duke of Buckingham' opens with a fine description. 
Unfortunately, his descriptions in long poems are, like many 
fine mornings, succeeded by a cloudy day : — 

" The lark, that holds observance to the sun, 
Quaver'd her clear notes in the quiet air, 
And on the river's murmuring base did run, 
Whilst the pleased heavens her fairest livery wear ; 
The place such pleasure gently did prepare, 
The flowers my smell, the flood my taste to steep, 
And the much softness lulled me asleep. 
When, in a vision, as it seem'd to me. 
Triumphal music from the flood arose." 
***** 

Of the grand beauties of poetry he has none ; but of the 
sparkling lightness of his best manner an example may be given 
in the following stanzas, from his sketch of ' The Poet's Elysium.' 

" A Paradise on earth is found, 
Though far from vulgar sight, 
Which with those pleasures doth abound, 

That it Elysium hight. 
***** 

The winter here a summer is, 

No waste is made by time ; 
Nor doth the autumn ever miss 

The blossoms of the prime. 
***** 

Those cliffs whose craggy sides are clad 

With trees of sundry suits, 
Which make continual summer glad, 

E'en bending with their fruits — 

Some ripening, ready some to fall. 

Some blossom'd, some to bloom, 
Like gorgeous hangings on the wall 

Of some rich princely room. 



74 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part ii. 

There, in perpetual summer shade, 

Apollo's prophets sit, 
Among the flowers that never fade, 

But flourish like their wit ; 

To whom the nymphs, upon their lyres, 

Tune many a curious lay. 
And, with their most melodious quires. 

Make short the longest day. 

Daniel is ^^ someiohat 2.-flat^^ as one of his contemporaries i 
said of him,* but he had more sensibility than Drayton, and his 13 
moral reflection rises to higher dignity. The lyrical poetry of 1| 
Elizabeth's age runs often into pastoral insipidity and fantastic i 
carelessness, though there may be found in some of the pieces of 
Sir Philip Sydney, Lodge, Marlowe, and Breton, not only a 
sweet wild spirit but an exquisite finish of expression. Of these ; 
combined beauties Marlowe's song, ' Come live with me, and be 
my love,' is an example. ' The Soul's Errand,'| by whomsoever 
it was written, is a burst of genuine poetry. I know not how 
that short production has ever affected other readers, but it 
carries to my imagination an appeal which I cannot easily 
account for from a few simple rhymes. It places the last and 
inexpressibly awful hour of existence before my view, and sounds 
like a sentence of vanity on the things of this world, pronounced 
by a dying man, whose eye glares on eternity, and whose voice 
is raised by strength from another world 4 Raleigh, also (ac- 
cording to Puttenham), had a " lofty and passionate" vein. It 
is difficult, however, to authenticate his poetical relics. Of the 
numerous sonnetteers of that time (keeping Shakspeare and 
Spenser apart), Drummond and Daniel are certainly the best. 
Hall was the master satirist of the age ; obscure and quaint at 
times, but full of nerve and picturesque illustration. No con- 
temporary satirist has given equal grace and dignity to moral 
censure. Very unequal to him in style, though often as original 
in thought, and as graphic in exhibiting manners, is Donne, 

* [Bolton, in his ' Hypercritica,' 1622.] 

t [Mr. Campbell means the poem properly and better known as ' The 
Lie.'] 

X Is not ' The Soul's Errand' the same poem with ' The Soul's Knell,' which 
is always ascribed to Richard Edwards ? — If so. why has it been inserted in 
Ealeigh's poems by Sir Egerton Brydges ? [They are distinct poems ; ' The 
Soul's Errand ' is what is called ' The Lie.' See jpost^ Sir Walter Ealeigh. ] 



PART II.] SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 75 

some of whose satires have been modernized by Pope.* Corbet 
has left some humorous pieces of raillery on the Puritans. 
Wither, all fierce and fanatic on the opposite side, has nothing 
more to recommend him in invective than the sincerity of that 
zeal for God's house which ate him up. Marston, better known 
in the drama than in satire, was characterised by his contempo- 
raries for his ruffian style. He has more will than skill in 
invective. ^'^ He puts in his blows with love" as the pugilists 
say of a hard but artless fighter ; a degrading image, but on that 
account not the less applicable to a coarse satirist. 

Donne was the " best goodnatured man, with the worst- 
natured Muse." A romantic and uxorious lover, he addresses 
the object of his real tenderness with ideas that outrage decorum. 
He begins his own epithalamium with a most indelicate invocation 
to his bride. His ruggedness and whim are almost proverbially 
known. "f Yet there is a beauty of thought which at intervals 
rises from his chaotic imagination, like the form of Venus 
smiling on the waters. Giles and Phineas Fletcher possessed 
harmony and fancy. The simple Warner has left, in his 
' Argentile and Curan,' perhaps the finest pastoral episode in 
our language. Browne was an elegant describer of rural scenes, 
though incompetent to fill them with life and manners. As a 
poetical narrator of fiction, Chalkhill \ is rather tedious ; but he 
atones for the slow progress of his narrative by many touches 
of rich and romantic description. His numbers are as musical 
as those of any of his contemporaries who employ the same form 
of versification. It was common with the writers of the heroic 
couplet of that age to bring the sense to a full and frequent 
pause in the middle of the line. This break, by relieving the 

* [Would not Donne's satires, which abound with so much wit, appear 
more charming if he had taken care of his words and his numbers ? * * * 
I may safely say of this present age, that if we are not so great wits as 
Donne, yet certainly we are better poets. — Dryden.] 

t [Nothing could have made Donne a poet, unless as great a change had 
been worked in the internal structure of his ears as was wrought in elon- 
gating those of Midas. — Southey, Specimens, p. xxiv.] 

J Chalkhill was a gentleman and a scholar, the friend of Spenser. He 
died before he could finish the fable of his * Thealma and Clearchus,' which 
was published, long after his death, by Isaak Walton. [And has been 
since reprinted ; one of Mr. Singer's numerous contributions to our litera- 
ture. For the whole of the known particulars of Chalkhill's life, see Sir 
Harris Nicolas *s « Life of Walton.'] 



76 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [pakt n. 



uniformity of the couplet measure, sometimes produces a graceful 
effect and a varied harmony which we miss in the exact and 
unbroken tune of our later rhyme ; a beauty of which the reader 
will probably be sensible in perusing such lines of ChalkhilFs as 

** And ever and anon he might well hear 
A sound of music steal in at his ear, 
As the wind gave it being. So sweet an air 
Would strike a siren mute ." 

This relief, however, is used rather too liberally by the elder 
rhymists, and is, perhaps, as often the result of their carelessness 
as of their good taste. Nor is it at all times obtained by them 
without the sacrifice of one of the most important uses of rhyme, 
namely, the distinctness of its effect in marking the measure. 
The chief source of the gratification which the ear finds in 
rhyme is our perceiving the emphasis of sound coincide with 
that of sense. In other words, the rhyme is best placed on the 
most emphatic word in the sentence. But it is nothing unusual 
with the ancient couplet-writers, by laying the rhyme on un- 
important words, to disappoint the ear of this pleasure, and to 
exhibit the restraint of rhyme without its emphasis. 

In classical translation Phaer and Golding were the earliest 
successors of Lord Surrey. Phaer published his 'Virgil' in 
1562, and Golding his 'Ovid' three years later.* Both of 

* [The first seven books of Phaer's * Virgil' were first printed in 1558, 
the eighth, ninth, and the fragment of the tenth in 1562. Twyne's continua- 
tion was first printed in 1573. 

In 1565 Golding published the first four books of Ovid's * Metamorphoses,' 
and in 1567 a translation of the whole. 

We have had the good fortune to fall in with a notice of Arthur Golding 
in a Museum MS. of orders made on petitions to the Privy Council from 
1605 to 1616. " No particulars," says Mr. Collier, "of the life of Golding 
have been recovered. He does not appear to have written anything after 
1590, but the year of his death is uncertain." — Bridge. Cat., p. 130. 

Hatfield, the xxvth of July, 1605. 

Arthiire Golding His Ma^ is graciouslie pleased that the lord Arch- 

to have the sole byshopp of Canterburie his Grace and his Ma" Atturney 

printing of some Genall shall advisedlie consider of this sut, and for 

books translated such of the books as they shall think meete for the 

bf/ himself. benefitt of the church and commonweal e to be solie 

printed by this peticon"^ and wherby noe enormious 

monopolies may ensue, his Ma" Atturney is to drawe a 

book ready for his Ma" signature, contayning a graunt 

hereof to the peticoner, leaving a blank for the number 

of yeires to be inserted at his Ma'* pleasure. 

Lans. MSS. No. 266, folio 61.] 



i PART II.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 77 



these translators, considering the state of the language, have 
considerable merit. Like them, Chapman, who came later, 
employed in his version of the ' Iliad ' the fourteen-syllable 
rhyme, which was then in favourite use. Of the three trans- 
laters, Phaer is the most faithful and simple, Golding the most 
musical, and Chapman the most spirited ; though Chapman is 
prone to the turgid, and often false to the sense of Homer. 
Phaer's ' ^neid ' has been praised by a modern writer,* in the 
' Lives of the Nephews of Milton,' with absurd exaggeration. 
I have no wish to disparage the fair value of the old translator ; 
but when the biographer of Milton's nephews declares " that 
nothing in language or conception can exceed the style in which 
Phaer treats of the last day of the existence of Troy," I know of 
no answer to this assertion but to give the reader the very 
passage which is pronounced so inimitable — although, to save 
myself further impediment in the text, I must subjoin it in 
a note.f 

* [William Godwin.] 

f ENEAS'S NARRATIVE AFTER THE DEATH OF PRIAM. — ENEID II. 

" Than first the cruel fear me caught, and sore my sprites appall'd, 
And on my father dear I thought, his face to mind I call'd, 
Whan slain with grisly wound our king, him like of age in sight, 
Lay gasping dead, and of my wife Creuse bethought the plight. 
Alone, forsake, my house despoil'd, my child what chaunce had take, 
1 looked, and about me view'd what strength I might me make. 
All men had me forsake for paynes, and down their bodies drew. 
To ground they leapt, and some for woe themselves in fires they threw. 
And now alone was left but I whan Vesta's temple stair 
To keep and secretly to lurk all crouching close in chair. 
Dame Helen I might see to sit ; bright burnings gave me light, 
Wherever I went, the ways I pass'd, all thing was set in sight. 
She fearing her the Trojans wrath, for Troy destroy'd to wreke, 
Greek's torments and her husband's force, whose wedlock she did break, 
The plague of Troy and of her country, monster most ontame. 
There sat she with her hated head, by the altars hid for shame. 
Straight in my breast I -felt a fire, deep wrath my heart did strain, 
My country's fall to wreak, and bring that cursed wretch to pain. 
What ! shall she into her country soil of Sparta and high Mycene, 
All safe shall she return, and there on Troy triumph as queen ? 
Her husband, children, country, kynne, her bouse, her parents old. 
With Trojan wives, and Trojan lords, her slaves shall she behold ? 
Was Priam slain with sword for this ? Troy burnt with fire so wood ? 
Is it herefore that Dardan strondes so often hath sweat with blood ? 
Not so ; for though it be no praise on woman kind to wreak, 
And honour none there lieth in this, nor name for men to speak, 



78 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part ir. 

The harmony of Fairfax is justly celebrated.* Joshua Syl- 
vester's version of the * Divine Weeks and Works ' of the French 
poet Dubartas was among the most popular of our early trans- 
lations ; and the obligations which Milton is alleged to have 
owed to it have revived Sylvester's name with some interest in 
modern criticism. Sylvester was a Puritan, and so was the pub- 
lisher of his work, Humphrey Lownes, who lived in the same 
street with Milton's father ; and from the congeniality of their 
opinions, it is not improbable that they might be acquainted. 
It is easily to be conceived that Milton often repaired to the 
shop of Lownes, and there first met with the pious didactic 
poem. Lauder was the earliest to trace Milton's particular 
thoughts and expressions to Sylvester; and, as might be ex- 
pected, maliciously exaggerated them. Later writers took up 

Yet quench I shall this poison here, and due deserts to dight, 

Men shall commend my zeal, and ease my mind I shall outright : 

This much for all my people's bones and country's flame to quite. 

These things within myself I tost, and fierce with force I ran, 

Whan to my face my mother great, so brim no time till than, 

Appearing shew'd herself in sight, all shining pure by night, 

Right goddess-like appearing, such as heavens beholds her bright. 

So great with majesty she stood, and me by right-hand take, 

She stay'd, and, red as rose, with mouth these words to me she spake : 

My son, what sore outrage so wild thy wrathful mind upstares ? 

Why frettest thou, or where alway from us thy care withdrawn appears ? 

Nor first unto thy father see'st, whom, feeble in all this woe, 

Thou hast forsake, nor if thy wife doth live thou know'st or no, 

Nor young Ascanius, thy child, whom throngs of Greeks about 

Doth swarming run, and, were not my relief, withouten doubt 

By this time flames had by devour'd, or swords of en'mies kill'd. 

It is not Helen's fate of Greece this town, my son, hath spill'd, 

Nor Paris is to blame for this, but Gods, with grace unkind, 

This wealth hath overthrown, a Troy from top to ground outwind. 

Behold ! for now away the cloud and dim fog will I take. 

That over mortal eyes doth hang, and blind thy sight doth make ; 

Thou to thy parents haste, take heed (dread not) my mind obey. 

In^yonder place, where stones from stones, and buildings huge to sway 

Thou seest, and, mixt in dust and smoke, thick streams of richness rise, 

Himself the God Neptune that side doth turn in wonders wise, 

With fork three-tined the walls uproots, foundations all too shakes, 

And quite from under soil the town with ground-works all uprakes. 

On yonder side, with furies mixt, Dame Juno fiercely stands, 

The gates she keeps, and from their ships the Greeks, her friendly bands, 

In armour girt, she calls." 

* [Many besides myself have heard our famous Waller own that he de- 
rived the harmony of his numbers from the ' Godfrey of Bulloigne," which 
was turned into English by Mr. Fairfax.— Dryden, Malone, vol. iv. p. 592.] 



I PABT II.1 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 79 

the subject with a very different spirit. Mr. Todd, the learned 
I editor of Spenser, noticed, in a number of ' The Gentleman's 
I Magazine,'* the probability of Milton's early acquaintance with 
; the translation of Dubartas's poem ; and Mr. Dunster has since, 
I in his ' Essay on Milton's early Reading,' supported the opinion 
' that the same work contains the prima stamina of ' Paradise 
Lost,' and laid the first foundation of that " monumentum cere 
perenniusr Thoughts and expressions there certainly are in 
Milton which leave his acquaintance with Sylvester hardly 
! questionable ; although some of the expressions quoted by Mr. 
Dunster, which are common to them both, may be. traced back 
to other poets older than Sylvester. The entire amount of his 
obligations, as Mr. Dunster justly admits, cannot detract from 
our opinion of Milton. If Sylvester ever stood high in his 
favour, it must have been when he was very young.f The beau- 
ties which occur so strangely intermixed with bathos and flatness 
in Sylvester's poem might have caught the youthful discernment, 
and long dwelt in the memory, of the great poet. But he must 
have perused it with disgust at Sylvester's general manner. 
Many of his epithets and happy phrases were really worthy of 
Milton ; but by far the greater proportion of his thoughts and 
expressions have a quaintness and flatness more worthy of Quarles 
and Wither. 

The following lines may serve as no unfavourable specimens 
of his translation of Dubartas's poem. 

PROBABILITr OF THE CELESTIAL ORBS BEING INHABITED. 

" I not believe that the great architect 
With all these fires the heavenly arches deck'd 
Only for show, and with these glistering shields 
T' amaze poor shepherds watching in the fields ; 
I not believe that the least flower which pranks 
Our garden borders, or our common banks, 



* For November, 1796. 

t [I remember, when I was a boy, I thought inimitable Spenser a mean 
poet in comparison of Sylvester's ' Dubartas,' and was rapt intoecstacy when 
1 read these lines : — 

" Now, when the Winter's keener breath began 
To crystal ize the Baltic ocean, 
To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods, 
And periwig with wool the bald-pate woods." 

I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian. — Dryden.] 



80 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part il 



And the least stone that in her warming lap 

Our mother earth doth covetously wrap, 

Hath some peculiar virtue of its own, 

And that the glorious stars of heaven have none." 

THE serpent's address TO EVE WHEN HE TEMPTED HER IN EDEN. 

" As a false lover, that thick snares hath laid 
T' entrap the honour of a fair young maid, ''■ 

If she (though little) list'uing ear affords 
To his sweet-courting, deep-affecting words, 
Feels some assuaging of his ardent flame. 
And soothes himself with hopes to win his game, ; 

While, wrapt with joy, he on his point persists. 
That parleying city never long resists — i 

Even so the serpent. * * * - 

Perceiving Eve his flattering gloze digest, >. 

He prosecutes, and jocund doth not rest. 
No, Fair (quoth he), believe not that the care 
God hath from spoiling Death mankind to spare 
Makes him forbid you, on such strict condition, 
His purest, rarest, fairest fruit's fruition. 
***** 

Begin thy bliss, and do not fear the threat , 

Of an uncertain Godhead, only great 

Through self-awed zeal — put on the glist'ning pall 

Of immortality." 

MORNING. 

" Arise betimes, while th' opal-colour'd mom ^ 

In golden pomp doth May-day's door adorn." 

The ^'opal-colour'd morn "is a beautiful expression that I! 
do not remember any other poet to have ever used. ; 

The school of poets which is commonly called the metaphy-l 
sical began in the reign of Elizabeth with Donne ; but the term 
of metaphysical poetry would apply with much more justice to„ 
the quatrains of Sir John Davies, and those of Sir Fulke G^e-^^ 
ville, writers who, at a later period, found imitators in Siif 
Thomas Overbury and Sir William Davenant.* Davies's poemi 
on the Immortality of the Soul, entitled ' Nosce teipsum,' will^ 
convey a much more favourable idea of metaphysical poetry: 
than the wittiest effusions of Donne and his followers. Davies; 
carried abstract reasoning into verse with an acuteness and fell-!: 
city which have seldom been equalled. He reasons, undoubtedly, - 

* [Johnson has been unjustly blamed for the name applied to Donne' 
and his followers, of metaphysical poets, but it was given to this school before 
Johnson wrote, by Dry den and by Pope. However, as Mr. Southey has' 
said, " If it were easy to find a better name, so much deference is due to 
Johnson, that his should be still adhered to."] 



PART II.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 81 

with too much labour, formality, and subtlety, to afford uniform 
poetical pleasure. The generality of his stanzas exhibit hard 
arguments interwoven with the pliant materials of fancy so 
closely, that we may compare them to a texture of cloth and 
metallic threads, which is cold and stiff, while it is splendidly 
curious. There is this difference, however, between Davies and 
the commonly styled metaphysical poets, that he argues like a 
hard thinker, and they, for the most part, like madmen. If we 
conquer the drier parts of Davies's poem, and bestow a little 
attention on thoughts which were meant, not to gratify the in- 
dolence, but to challenge the activity of the mind, we shall find 
in the entire essay fresh beauties at every perusal : for in the 
happier parts we come to logical truths so well illustrated by 
ingenious similes, that we know not whether to call the thoughts 
more poetically or philosophically just. The judgment and 
fancy are reconciled, and the imagery of the poem seems to start 
more vividly from the surrounding shades of abstraction. 

Such were some of the first and inferior luminaries of that 
brilliant era of our poetry, which, perhaps, in general terms, 
may be said to cover about the last quarter of the sixteenth, and 
the first quarter of the seventeenth century ; and which, though 
commonly called the age of Elizabeth, comprehends many writers 
belonging to the reign of her successor. The romantic spirit, 
the generally unshackled style, and the fresh and fertile genius 
of that period, are not to be called in question. On the other 
hand, there are defects in the poetical character of the age, 
which, though they may disappear or be of little account amidst 
the excellences of its greatest writers, are glaringly conspicuous 
in the works of their minor contemporaries. In prolonged nar- 
rative and description the writers of that age are peculiarly 
deficient in that charm which is analogous to " keeping " in 
pictures. Their warm and cold colours are generally without 
the gradations which should make them harmonize. They fall 
precipitately from good to bad thoughts, from strength to im- 
becility. Certainly they are profuse in the detail of natural 
circumstances, and in the utterance of natural feelings. For 
this we love them, and we should love them still more if they 
knew where to stop in description and sentiment. But they give 
out the dregs of their mind without reserve, till their fairest 

G 



82 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [pakt u. r; 

conceptions are overwhelmed by a rabble of mean associations. 
At no period is the mass of vulgar mediocrity in poetry marked 
by more formal gallantry, by grosser adulation, or by coarser 
satire. Our amatory strains in the time of Charles II. may be 
more dissolute, but those of Elizabeth's age often abound in 
studious and prolix licentiousness. Nor are examples of this 
solemn and sedate impurity to be found only in the minor poets : 
our reverence for Shakspeare himself need not make it necessary 
to disguise that he willingly adopted that style in his youth, 
when he wrote his ' Yenus and Adonis.' 

The fashion of the present day [1819] is to solicit public esteem 
not only for the best and better, but for the humblest and meanest 
writers of the age of Elizabeth. It is a bad book which has 
not something good in it ; and even some of the worst writers of 
that period have their twinkling beauties. In one point of 
view the research among such obscure authors is undoubtedly 
useful. It tends to throw incidental lights on the great old 
poets, and on the manners, biography, and language of the 
country. So far all is well — but as a matter of taste, it is apt 
to produce illusion and disappointment. Men like to make the 
most of the slightest beauty which they can discover in an obso- 
lete versifier ; and they quote perhaps the solitary good thought 
which is to be found in such a writer, omitting any mention of 
the dreary passages which surround it. Of course it becomes a 
lamentable reflection, that so valuable an old poet should have 
been forgotten. When the reader, however, repairs to him, he 
finds that there are only one or two grains of gold in all the 
sands of this imaginary Pactolus. But the display of neglected 
authors has not been even confined to glimmering beauties ; it 
has been extended to the reprinting of large and heavy masses 
of dulness. Most wretched works have been praised in this 
enthusiasm for the obsolete; even the dullest works of the 
meanest contributors to * The Mirror for Magistrates.' It 
seems to be taken for granted, that the inspiration of the good 
old times descended to the very lowest dregs of its versifiers ; 
whereas the bad writers of Elizabeth's age are only more stiff 
and artificial than those of the preceding, and more prolix than 
those of the succeeding period. 

Yet there are men who, to all appearance, would wish to re- 



kvBT III.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 83 

Ivive such authors — not for the mere use of the antiquary, to 
|n'hom every volume may be useful, but as standards of manner, 
and objects of general admiration. Books, it is said, take up 
jlittle room. In the library this may be the case ; but it is not 
'so in the minds and time of those who peruse them. Happily, 

Eiideed, the task of pressing indifferent authors on the public 
ittention is a fruitless one. They may be dug up from oblivion, 
|but life cannot be put into their reputations. " Can these bones 
|live?" Nature will have her course, and dull books will be 
[forgotten, in spite of bibliographers. 



PART III. 

The pedantic character of James I. has been frequently repre- 
sented as the cause of degeneracy in English taste and genius. 
It must be allowed that James was an indifferent author ; and 
that neither the manners of his court nor the measures of his 
reign were calculated to excite romantic virtues in his subjects. 
But the opinion of his character having influenced the poetical 
spirit of the age unfavourably is not borne out by facts. He 
was friendly to the stage and to its best writers : he patronized 
Ben Jonson, and is said to have written a complimentary letter 
to Shakspeare with his own hand.* We may smile at the idea 
of James's praise being bestowed as an honour upon Shakspeare ; 
the importance of the compliment, however, is not to be esti- 
mated by our present opinion of the monarch, but by the ex- 
cessive reverence with which royalty was at that time invested 
in men's opinions. James's reign was rich in poetical names, 
some of which have been already enumerated. We may be re- 
j minded, indeed, that those poets had been educated under 
i Elizabeth, and that their genius bore the high impress of her 
I heroic times ; but the same observation will also oblige us to 
! recollect that Elizabeth's age had its traits of depraved fashion 

\ * This anecdote is given by Oldys on the authority of the Duke of Buck- 
I ingham, who [is said to have] had it from Sir William Davenant. [The 
{ cause assigned, au obscure allusion in ' Macbeth,' is a very lame and unlikely 
I one.] 



84 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part iir.t 

(witness its Euphuism),* and that the first examples of the vvorsti 
taste which ever infected our poetry were given in her days, and-l 
not in those of her successor. Donne (for instance), the pa- 
triarch of the metaphysical generation, was thirty years of ag« 
at the date of James's accession, a time at which his taste and:i 
style were sufficiently formed to acquit his learned sovereign of 
all blame in having corrupted them. Indeed, if we were to 
make the memories of our kings accountable for the poetical 
faults of their respective reigns, we might reproach Charles I.^ 
among whose faults bad taste is certainly not to be reckoned, 
with the chief disgrace of our metaphysical poetry ; since that 
school never attained its unnatural perfection so completely as 
in the luxuriant ingenuity of Cowley's fancy, and the knotted 
deformity of Cleveland's. For a short time after the suppression 
of the theatres, till the time of Milton, the metaphysical poets 
are forced upon our attention for want of better objects. But 
during James's reign there is no such scarcity of good writers 
as to oblige us to dwell on the school of elaborate conceit. ■ 
Phineas Fletcher has been sometimes named as an instance of 
the vitiated taste which prevailed at this period. He, however, 
though musical and fanciful, is not to be admitted as a repre- 
sentative of the poetical character of those times, which included 
Jonson, Beaumont and John Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, and 
Shirley. Shakspeare was no more; but there were dramatic 
authors of great and diversified ability. The romantic school of 
the drama continued to be more popular than the classical, 
though in the latter Ben Jonson lived to see imitators of his 
own manner, whom he was not ashamed to adopt as his poetical 
heirs. Of these Cartwright and Randolph were the most emi- 
nent. The originality of Cartwright's plots is always acknow- 
ledged ; and Jonson used to say of him, " Mt/ son Cartwright 
writes all like a man." 

Massinger is distinguished for the harmony and dignity of 
his dramatic eloquence. Many of his plots, it is true, are liable 
to heavy exceptions. The fiends and angels of his * Virgin 
Martyr ' are unmanageable tragic machinery ; and the incestuous 
passion of his ' Ancient Admiral ' excites our horror. The poet 

* An affected jargon of style, -whicli was fashionable for some time at 
the court of Elizabeth, and so called from the work of Lyly entitled ' Eaphues." 



ijPABTiii.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. ' 85. 

IjoF love is driven to a frightful expedient, when he gives it the 
j terrors of a maniac passion breaking down the most sacred pale 
■j of instinct and consanguinity. The ancient Admiral is in love 
)i M'ith his own daughter. Such a being, if we fancy him to exist, 
strikes us as no object of moral warning, but as a man under 
tlie influence of insanity. In a general view, nevertheless, 
jMassinger has more art and judgment in the serious drama than 
ijauy of the other successors of Shakspeare. His incidents are 
1 less entangled than those of Fletcher, and the scene of his action 
J is more clearly thrown open for the free evolution of character. 
l| Fletcher strikes the imagination with more vivacity, but more 
irregularly, and amidst embarrassing positions of his own 
choosing. Massinger puts forth his strength more collectively. 
Fletcher has more action and character in his drama, and leaves 
a greater variety of impressions upon the mind. His fancy is 
more volatile and surprising, but then he often blends disap- 
pointment with our surprise, and parts with the consistency of 
liis characters even to the occasionally apparent loss of their 
^!j identity. This is not the case with Massinger. It is true that 
i Massinger excels more in description and declamation than in 
■i the forcible utterance of the heart, and in giving character the 
warm colouring of passion. Still, not to speak of his one dis- 
tinguished hero * in comedy, he has delineated several tragic 
; characters with strong and interesting traits. They are chiefly 
proud spirits. Poor himself, and struggling under the rich 
man's contumely, we may conceive it to have been the solace of 
his neglected existence to picture worth and magnanimity break- 
ing through external disadvantages, and making their way to 
love and admiration. Hence his fine conceptions of Paris, the 
actor, exciting by the splendid endowments of his nature the 
jealousy of the tyrant of the world ; and Don John and Pisander, 
habited as slaves, wooing and winning their princely mistresses. 
He delighted to show heroic virtue stripped of all adventitious 
circumstances, and tried, like a gem, by its shining through 
darkness. His ' Duke of Milan' is particularly admirable for the 
blended interest which the poet excites by the opposite weak- 
nesses and magnanimity of the same character. Sforza, Duke 
of Milan, newly married and uxoriously attached to the haughty 
* Sir Giles Overreach. 



86 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part 111.1^ 

Marcelia, a woman of exquisite attractions, makes her an object 
of secret but deadly enmity at his court, by the extravagant 
homage which he requires to be paid to her, and the precedence 
which he enjoins even his own mother and sisters to yield her. 
As chief of Milan he is attached to the fortunes of Francis I. 
The sudden tidings of the approach of Charles Y., in the cam- 
paign which terminated with the battle of Pavia, soon afterwards 
spread dismay through his court and capital. Sforza, though 
valiant and self-collected in all that regards the warrior or poli- 
tician, is hurried away by his immoderate passion for Marcelia ; 
and being obliged to leave her behind, but unable to bear the 
thoughts of her- surviving him, obtains the promise of a con- 
fidant to destroy her, should his own death appear inevitable. 
He returns to his capital in safety. Marcelia, having discovered 
the secret order, receives him with coldness. His jealousy is in- 
flamed ; and her perception of that jealousy alienates the haughty, 
object of his affection, when she is on the point of reconcilement. 
The fever of Sforza's diseased heart is powerfully described, 
passing from the extreme of dotage to revenge, and returning 
again from thence to the bitterest repentance and prostration, 
when he has struck at the life which he most loved, and has 
made, when it is too late, the discovery of her innocence. Mas- 
singer always enforces this moral in love;— he punishes distrust, 
and attaches our esteem to the unbounded confidence of the 
passion. But while Sforza thus exhibits a warning against 
morbidly-selfish sensibility, he is made to appear, without vio- 
lating probability, in all other respects a firm, frank, and pre- 
possessing character. When his misfortunes are rendered 
desperate by the battle of Pavia, and when he is brought into 
the presence of Charles V., the intrepidity with which he pleads 
his cause disarms the resentment of his conqueror ; and the elo- 
quence of the poet makes us expect that it should do so. Instead 
of palliating his zeal for the lost cause of Francis, he thus pleads : — 

*' I come not, Emperor, to iuvade thy mercy 
By fawuing on thy fortune, nor bring with me 
Excuses or denials ; 1 profess. 
And -with a good man's confidence, even this instant 
That I am in thy power, I was thine enemy. 
Thy deadly and vow'd enemy ; one that wish"d 
Confusion to thy person and estates. 
And with my utmost power, and deepest counsels, 



PART III.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 87 

Had they been truly foUow'd, further'd it. 
Nor will I now, although my neck were under 
The hangman's axe, with one poor syllable 
Confess but that I honour'd the French king 
More than thyself and all men." 

-^fter describing his obligations to Francis, he says — 

" He was indeed to me as my good angel, 
To guard me from all daugei'. I dare speak, 
Nay must and vnll, his praise now in as high 
And loud a key as when he was thy equal. 
The benefits he sow"d in me met not 
Unthankful ground. * * * * 
* * * * If then to be grateful 
For benefits received, or not to leave 
A friend in his necessities, be a crime 
Amongst you Spaniards, Sforza brings his head 
To pay the forfeit. Nor come I as a slave, 
Pinion'd and fetter'd, in a squalid weed. 
Falling before thy feet, kneeling and howling 
For a forestall'd remission — that were poor. 
And would but shame thy victory, for conquest 
Over base foes is a captivity. 
And not a triumph. I ne'er fear'd to die 
More than I wish'd to live. When I had reach'd 
My ends in being a duke, I wore these robes. 
This crown upon my head, and to my side 
This sword was girt ; and, witness truth, that now 
'Tis in another's power, when I shall part 
With life and them together, I'm the same — 
My veins then did not swell with pride, nor now 
Shrink they for fear." 

If the vehement passions were not Massinger's happiest 
element, he expresses fixed principle with an air of authority. 
To make us feel the elevation of genuine pride was the master- 
key which he knew how to touch in human sympathy ; and liis 
skill in it must have been derived from deep experience in his 
own bosom.* 

The theatre of Beaumont and Fletcher contains all manner of 
good and evil. Fletcher's share in the works collectively pub- 

* [Although incalculably superior to his contemporaries, Shakspeare had 
successful imitators ; and the art of Jonson was not unrivalled. Massinger 
appears to have studied the works of both, with the intention of uniting 
their excellences. He knew the strength of plot ; and although his plays 
are altogether irregular, yet he well understood the advantage of a strong and 
defined interest; and in unravelling the intricacy of his intrigues he often 
displays the management of a master. — Sir "Walter Scott, Misc. Prose 
Works, vol. vi. p. 342.] 



88 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [paet hi. 

lished with their names is by far the largest ; and he is 
chargeable with the greatest number of faults, although at the 
same time his genius was more airy, prolific, and fanciful. There 
are such extremes of grossness and magnificence in their drama, 
so much sweetness and beauty interspersed with views of nature 
either falsely romantic or vulgar beyond reality ; there is so 
much to animate and amuse us, and yet so much that we would 
willingly overlook, that I cannot help comparing the contrasted 
impressions which they make to those which we receive from 
visiting some great and ancient city, picturesquely but irregularly 
built, glittering with spires and surrounded with gardens, but 
exhibiting in many quarters the lanes and hovels of wretchedness. 
They have scenes of wealthy and high life which remind us of 
courts and palaces frequented by elegant females and high- 
spirited gallants, whilst their noble old martial characters, with 
Caractacus in the midst of them, may inspire us with the same 
sort of regard which we pay to the rough-hewn magnificence of 
an ancient fortress. 

Unhappily, the same simile, without being hunted down, will 
apply but too faithfully to the nuisances of their drama. Their 
language is often basely profligate. Shakspeare's and Jonson's 
indelicacies are but casual blots, whilst theirs are sometimes 
essential colours of their painting, and extend, in one or two 
instances, to entire and offensive scenes. This fault has deservedly 
injured their reputation; and, saving a very slight allowance for 
the fashion and taste of their age, admits of no sort of apology.* 
Their drama, nevertheless, is a very wide one, and " has ample 
room and verge enough "f to permit the attention to wander 
from these and to fix on more inviting peculiarities — as on the 
great variety of their fables and personages, their spirited dialogue, 
their wit, pathos, and humour. Thickly sown as their blemishes 
are, their merit will bear great deductions, and still remain great. 
We never can forget such beautiful characters as their Cellide, 
their Aspatia, and Bellario, or such humorous ones as their La 

* [Ravenscroft, the filthiest writer for the stage in the reign of the 
second Charles, is not more obscene than Beaumont and Fletcher. Yet 
Earle, "who -was in the church and a bishop withal, praises their plays for 
their purity ; and Lovelace likens the nakedness of their language to Cupid 
dressed in Diana's linen.] 

t [Dryden.] 



jrARTiii.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 89 

Writ and Cacafogo. Awake they will always keep us, whether 

\ to quarrel or to be pleased with them. Their invention is fruit- 

! ful ; its beings are on the whole an active and sanguine genera- 

jtion; and their scenes are crowded to fulness with the warmth, 

agitation, and interest of life. 

In thus speaking of them together, it may be necessary 
j to allude to the general and traditionary understanding that 
i Beaumont was the graver and more judicious genius of the two. 
I Yet the plays in which he may be supposed to have assisted 
i Fletcher are by no means remarkable either for harmonious 
i adjustment of parts or scrupulous adherence to probability. In 
! their ' Laws of Candy,' the winding up of the plot is accomplished 
I by a young girl commanding a whole bench of senators to 
i descend from their judgment-seats, in virtue of an ancient law of 
the state which she discovers ; and they obey her with the most 
polite alacrity. ' Cupid's Eevenge ' is assigned to them con- 
jointly, and is one of the very weakest of their worst class of 
pieces. On the other hand Fletcher produced his ' Rule a Wife 
and have a Wife ' after Beaumont's death, so that he was able, 
when he chose, to write with skill as well as spirit. 

Of that skill, however, he is often so sparing as to leave his 
characters subject to the most whimsical metamorphoses. Some- 
times they repent, like Methodists, by instantaneous conversion. 
At other times they shift from good to bad, so as to leave us in 
doubt what they were meant for. In the tragedy of ^ Valen- 
tinian ' we have a fine old soldier, Maximus, who sustains our 
affection through four acts, but in the fifth we are suddenly 
called upon to hate him, on being informed by his own confes- 
sion that he is very wicked, and that all his past virtue has been 
but a trick on our credulity. The imagination in this case is 
disposed to take part with the creature of the poet's brain against 
the poet himself, and to think that he maltreats and calumniates 
his own offspring unnaturally.* But for these faults Fletcher 

* The most amusingly absurd perhaps^of all Fletcher's bad plays is ' The 
Island Princess.' One might absolutely take it for a burlesque on the 
heroic drama, if its religious conclusion did not show the author to be in 
earnest. Quisara, Princess of the island of Tidore, where the Portuguese 
have a fort, offers her hand in marriage to any champion who shall deliver 
her brother, a captive of the governor of Ternata. Euy Dias, her Portu- 
guese lover, is shy of the adventure ; but another lover, Armusia, hires a 



90 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part ni. i 

makes good atonement, and has many affecting scenes. We 
must still indeed say scenes ; for, except in * The Faithful Shep- 
herdess,' which, unlike his usual manner, is very lulling, where 
shall we find him uniform ? If ' The Double Marriagfe ' could "J 
be cleared of some revolting passages, the part of Juliana would i' 
not be unworthy of the powers of the finest tragic actress. ^ 
Juliana is a high attempt to portray the saint and heroine 
blended in female character. When her husband Virolet's - 
conspiracy against Ferrand of Naples is discovered, she endures • 
and braves for his sake the most dreadful cruelties of the tyrant. 
Virolet flies from his country, obliged to leave her behind him, 
and, falling at sea into the hands of the pirate Duke of Sesse, 
saves himself and his associates from death, by consenting to 
marry the daughter of the pirate (Martia), who falls in love and ^ 

boat, with a few followers, which he hides, on landing at Tidore, among 5 
the reeds of the invaded island. He then disguises himself as a merchant, ; 
hires a cellar, like the Popish conspirators, and in the most credible manner 
blows up a considerable portion of a large town, rescues the king, slaughters 
all opposers, and re-embarks in his yawl from among the reeds. On his 
return he finds the lovely Quisara loth to fulfil her promise, from her being 
still somewhat attached to Ruy Dias. The base Ruy Dias sends his nephew, 
Piniero, to the Island Princess, with a project of assassinating Armusia ; but 
Piniero, who is a merry fellow, thinks it better to prevent his uncle's crime i 
and to make love for himself. Before his introduction to the Princess, how- ' 
ever, he meets with her aunt Quisana, to whom he talks abundance of 
ribaldry and double entendre, and so captivates the aged woman, that she 
exclaims to her attendant, " Pray thee let him talk still, for methinks he 
talks handsomely ! " — With the young lady he is equally successful, offers 
to murder anybody she pleases, and gains her afi'ections so far that she 
kisses him. The poor virtuous Armusia, in the mean time, determines to 
see his false Princess, makes his way to her chamber, and, in spite of her 
reproaches and her late kiss to Piniero, at last makes a new impression on 
her heart. The dear Island Princess is in love a third time, in the third 
act. In the fourth act the King of Tidore, lately delivered by Armusia, 
plots against the Christians ; he is accompanied by a Moorish priest, who is 
no other than the governor of Ternata, disguised in a false wig and beard-, 
but his Tidorian Majesty recollects his old enemy so imperfectly as to be 
completely deceived. This conspiracy alarms the Portuguese ; the cowardly 
Euy Dias all at once grows brave and generous ; Quisara joins the Christ- 
ians, and, for the sake of Armusia and her new faith, offers to be burnt 
alive. Nothing remains but to open the eyes of her brother, the King of 
Tidore. This is accomplished by the merry Piniero laying hold of the 
masqued governor's beard, which comes away without the assistance of a 
barber. The monarch exclaims that he cannot speak for astonishment and 
everything concludes agreeably. ' The Island Princess ' is not unlike some of 
the romantic dramas of Dryden's time ; but the later play- writers super- 
added a style of outrageous rant and turgid imagery. 



PART III.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 91 

elopes with him from her father's ship. As they carrj^ off with 
them the son of Ferrand, who had been a prisoner of the Duke 
of Sesse, Virolet secures his peace being made at Naples ; but 
when he has again to meet Juliana he finds that he has purchased 
life too dearly. When the ferocious Martia, seeing his repent- 
ance, revenges herself by plotting^ his destruction, and when his 
divorced Juliana, forgetting her injuries, flies to warn and to 
save him, their interview has no common degree of interest. 
Juliana is perhaps rather a fine idol of the imagination than a 
probable type of nature ; but poetry, which " conforms the shows 
of things to the desires of the soul,"* has a right to the highest 
possible virtues of human character. And there have been 
women who have prized a husband's life above their own, and 
his honour above his life, and who have united the tenderness of 
their sex to heroic intrepidity. Such is Juliana, who thus ex- 
horts the wavering fortitude of Virolet on the eve of his con- 
spiracy : — 

" Virolet. * * Unless our hands were cannon 
To batter down his walls, our weak breath mines 
To blow his forts up, or our curses lightning, 
Our power is like to yours, and we, like you, 
Weep our misfortunes." * * * * 

She replies — 

* * * " Walls of brass resist not 
A noble undertaking — nor can vice 
Eaise any bulwark to make good a place 
Where virtue seeks to enter." 

The joint dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher, entitled ' Philas- 
ter ' and ' The Maid's Tragedy,' exhibit other captivating female 
portraits. The difficulty of giving at once truth, strength, and 
delicacy to female repentance for the loss of honour, is finely 
accomplished in Evadne. The stage has perhaps few scenes 
more affecting than that in w^hich she obtains forgiveness of 
Amintor on terms which interest us in his compassion without 
compromising his honour. In the same tragedy,! the plaintive 
image of the forsaken Aspatia has an indescribably sweet spirit 
and romantic expression. Her fancy takes part with her heart, 
and gives its sorrow a visionary gracefulness. When she finds 

* Expression of Lord Bacon's. f The Maid's Tragedy. 



92 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETEY. [part hi. 



her maid Antiphila working a picture of Ariadne, she tells her 
to copy the likeness from herself, from " the lost Aspatia :" — 

" Asp. But Where's the lady ? 

A7it. There, Madam. 

Asp. Fie, you have miss'd it here, Antiphila ; 
These colours are not dull and pale enough 
To show a soul so full of misery 
As this sad lady's was. Do it by me — 
Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia, 
And you shall find all true. Put me on the wild island. 
I stand upon the sea-beach now, and think 
Mine arms thus, and my hair blown by the wind 
Wild as that desert, and let all about me 
Be teachers of my story. * * * 
* * * * Strive to make me look 
Like Sorrow's monument ; and the trees about me, 
Let them be dry and leafless ; let the rocks 
Groan with continual surges ; and behind me 
Make all a desolation. See, see, wenches, 
A miserable life of this poor picture." 

The resemblance of this poetical picture to Guido's Bacchus 
and Ariadne has been noticed by Mr. Seward in the preface to 
his edition of Beaumont and Fletcher. " In both representations 
the extended arms of the mourner, her hair blown by the wind, 
the barren roughness of the rocks around her, and the broken 
trunks of leafless trees, make her figure appear like Sorrow's 
monument." 

Their masculine characters in tragedy are generally much 
less interesting than their females. Some exceptions may be 
found to this remark ; particularly in the British chief Caracta- 
cus, and his interesting nephew the boy Hengo. With all the 
faults of the tragedy of ' Bonduca,' its British subject and its native 
heroes attach our hearts. We follow Caractacus to battle and 
captivity with a proud satisfaction in his virtue. The stubborn- 
ness of the old soldier is finely tempered by his wise, just, and 
candid respect for his enemies the Romans, and by his tender 
affection for his princely ward. He never gives way to sorrow 
till he looks on the dead body of his nephew, Hengo, when he 
thus exclaims : — 

* * * " Farewell the hopes of Britain ! 
Farewell thou royal graft for ever ! Time and Death, 
Ye have done your worst. Fortune, now see, now proudly 
Pluck off thy veil, and view thy triumph. 



I 

PART III.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 93 

I ♦ ♦ * * * O fair flower, 

How lovely yet thy ruins show — how sweetly 
Ev'n Death embraces thee ! The peace of Heaven, 

! The fellowship of all great souls, go with thee ! " 

I The character must be well supported which yields a sensation 
■ of triumph in the act of surrendering to victorious enemies. 
Caractacus does not need to tell us that when a brave man has 
done his duty he cannot be humbled by fortune — but he makes 
us feel it in his behaviour. The few brief and simple sentences 
which he utters in submitting to the Romans, together with their 
j respectful behaviour to him, give a sublime composure to his 
appearance in the closing scene. 

Dryden praises the gentlemen of Beaumont and Fletcher in 
comedy as the true men of fashion of " the times." It was neces- 
sary that Dryden should call them the men of fashion of the 
times, for they are not in the highest sense of the word gentle- 
men. Shirley's comic characters have much more of the con- 
versation and polite manners which we should suppose to belong 
to superior life in all ages and countries. The genteel charac- 
ters of Fletcher form a narrower class, and exhibit a more par- 
ticular image of their times and country. But their comic 
personages, after all, are a spirited race. In one province of 
the facetious drama they set the earliest example ; witness their 
humorous mock-heroic comedy, ' The Knight of the Burning 
Pestle.'* 

The memory of Ford has been deservedly revived as one of 
the ornaments of our ancient drama, though he has no great body 
of poetry, and has interested in us no other passion except that 
of love ; but in that he displays a peculiar depth and delicacy 

* [Beaumont and Fletcher seemed to have followed Shakspeare's mode 
of composition, rather than Jonson's. They may, indeed, be rather said to 
have taken for their model the boundless licence of the Spanish stage, from 
which many of their pieces are expressly and avowedly derived. The acts 
of their plays are so detached from each other in substance and consistency, 
that the plot can scarce be said to hang together at all, or to have, in any 
sense of the word, a beginning, progress, and conclusion. It seems as if the 
play began because the curtain rose, and ended because it fell. — Sir Walter 
Scott, Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 343. 
_ Beaumont and Fletcher's plots are wholly inartificial ; they only care to 
pitch a character into a position to make him or her talk ; you must swallow 
all their gross improbabilities, and, taking it all for granted, attend only to 
the dialogue.— Coleridge, Table Talk, p. 200.] 



94 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part ra. 

of romantic feeling.* Webster has a gloomy force of imagina- 
tion, not unmixed with the beautiful and pathetic. But it is 
" beauty in the lap of horror :" he caricatures the shapes of ter- 
ror, and his Pegasus is like a nightmare. Middleton,t Marston, 
Thomas Heywood, Decker, and Chapman, also present subordi- 
nate claims to remembrance in that fertile period of the drama. 

Shirley was the last of our good old dramatists. When his 
works shall be given to the public they will undoubtedly en- 
rich our popular literature. J His language sparkles with the 
most exquisite images. Keeping some occasional pruriencies 
apart, the fault of his age rather than of himself, he speaks the 
most polished and refined dialect of the stage ; and even some 
of his over-heightened scenes of voluptuousness are meant, 
though with a very mistaken judgment, to inculcate morality.§ 
I consider his genius, indeed, as rather brilliant and elegant 
than strong or lofty. His tragedies are defective in fire, gran- 
deur, and passion ; and we must select his comedies to have 
any favourable idea of his humour. His finest poetry comes 
forth in situations rather more familiar than tragedy and more 
grave than comedy, which I should call sentimental comedy, if 
the name were not associated with ideas of modern insipidity. 
That he was capable, however, of pure and excellent comedy 
will be felt by those who have yet in reserve the amusement 
of reading his ' Gamester,' ' Hyde Park,' and ' Lady of Pleasure.' 

* [Mr. Campbell observes that Ford interests us in no other passion than 
that of love ; " in which he displays a peculiar depth and delicacy of 
romantic feeling." Comparatively speaking, this may be admitted; but in 
justice to the poet, it should be added that he was not insensible to the 
power of friendship, and in more than one of his dramas has delineated it 
with a master-hand. Had the critic forgotten the noble Dalyell? — the 
generous and devoted Malfato ? Mr. Campbell, however, terms him " one 
of the ornaments of our ancient drama." — GiflFord, Ford, p. xl.] 

f INIiddleton's hags, in the tragi-comedy of ' The Witch,' were conjectured 
by Mr. Steevens to have given the hint to Shakspeare of his witches in 
' Macbeth.' It has been repeatedly remarked, however, that the resemblance 
scarcely extends beyond a few forms of incantation. The hags of Middleton 
are merely mischievous old women, those of Shakspeare influence the 
elements of nature and the destinies of man. 

X [They have been since published in six volumes octavo — the plays with 
notes by Gifford, the poems with notes by Mr, Dyce.] 

§ The scene in Shirley's ' Love's Cruelty,' for example, between Hippo- 
lito and the object of his admiration, act iv., scene i., and another in ' The 
Grateful Servant,' between Belinda and Lodwick. Several more might be 
mentioned. 



PABTin.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 95 

I In the first and last of these there is a subtle ingenuity in pro- 
jducing comic effect and surprise, which might be termed Attic, 
I if it did not surpass anything that is left us in Athenian comedy. 
i I shall leave to others the more special enumeration of his 
i faults, only observing, that the airy touches of his expression, 
I the delicacy of his sentiments, and the beauty of his similes, 
jare often found where the poet survives the dramatist, and 
I where he has not power to transfuse life and strong individuality- 
through the numerous characters of his voluminous drama. His 
! style, to use a line of his own, is " studded like a frosty night 
I with stars ;" and a severe critic might say that the stars often 
! shine when the atmosphere is rather too frosty. In other words, 
there is more beauty of fancy than strength of feeling in his works. 
' From this remark, however, a defender of his fame might justly 
appeal to exceptions in many of his pieces. From a general 
I impression of his works I should not paint his Muse with the 
haughty form and features of inspiration, but with a countenance, 
in its happy moments, arch, lovely, and interesting, both in 
I smiles and in tears ; crowned with flowers, and not unindebted 
i to ornament, but wearing the drapery and chaplet with a claim 
I to them from natural beauty. 

The contempt which Dryden expresses for Shirley* might 
surprise us, if it were not recollected that he lived in a degenerate 
age of dramatic taste, and that his critical sentences were neither 
infallible nor immutable. He at one time undervalued Otway, 
though he lived to alter his opinion. f 

The civil wars put an end to this dynasty of our dramatic 
poets. Their immediate successors or contemporaries, belonging 
to the reign of Charles I., many of whom resumed their lyres 
after the interregnum, may, in a general view, be divided into 
the classical and metaphysical schools. The former class, con- 
taining Denham, Waller, and Carew, upon the whole cultivated 

* [In Mac Flecknoe.] 

t [That Dryden at any time undervalued Otway we have no other proof 

than a cofiee-house criticism, retailed, though the retailer was Otway himself, 

at secondhand. The play that Dryden is said to have spoken petulantly 

and disparagingly about was ' Don Carlos.' ' The Orphan ' and ' Venice 

I Preserved ' were of a later date, and justified Dryden's firm conviction 

] that Otway possessed the art of expressing the passions and emotions of 

I the mind as thoroughly as any of the ancients or moderns. ' Don Carlos ' 

gives no promise of ' The Orphan/ or of ' Venice Preserved.'] 



96 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETKY. [part hi:' 

smooth and distinct melody of numbers, correctness of imagerj', 
and polished elegance of expression. The latter, in which 
Herrick and Cowley stood at the head of Donne's metaphysical 
followers, were generally loose or rugged in their versification, 
and preposterous in their metaphors. But this distinction can 
only be drawn in very general terms ; for Cowley, the prince 
of the metaphysicians, has bursts of natural feeling and just 
thoughts in the midst of his absurdities. And Herrick, who is 
equally whimsical, has left some little gems of highly-finished 
composition. On the other hand, the correct Waller is some- 
times metaphysical ; and ridiculous hyperboles are to be found 
in the elegant style of Carew. 

The characters of Denham, Waller, and Cowley have been 
often described. Had Cowley written nothing but his prose it ! 
would have stamped him a man of genius and an improver of i 
our language. Of his poetry Rochester indecorously said, that, ;| 
'' not being of God, it could not stand."* Had the word nature t| 
been substituted, it would have equally conveyed the intended !«l 
meaning, but still that meaning would not have been strictly «* 
just.f There is much in Cowley that will stand. He teems, in 
many places, with the imagery, the feeling, the grace, and gaiety 
of a poet. Nothing but a severer judgment was wanting to col- 
lect the scattered lights of his fancy. His unnatural flights arose ^ 
less from affectation than self-deception. He cherished false J 
thoughts as men often associate with false friends, not from in- ! 
sensibility to the difference between truth and falsehood, but ^. 
from being too indolent to examine the difference. Herrick, if > 
we were to fix our eyes on a small portion of his works, might be r. 
pronounced a writer of delightful Anacreontic spirit. He has ii 
passages where the thoughts seem to dance into numbers from' ' 
his very heart, and w^here he frolics like a being made up of 
melody and pleasure ; as when he sings — 

" Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, 
Old Time is still a-flying ; 
And this same flower that bloomis to-day, 
To-morrow will be dying." 



* [Told on the authority of Dryden. {Mahne, vol. iv. p. 6 1 2.) Yet Burnet, 
Joseph Warton, and Johnson speak of Cowley as JRochester's favourite author,] 
f [Nature is but a name for au effect 

Whose cause is God. — Cowper, The Task, b. vi.] 



JPABT III.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 97 



jIn the same spirit are his verses to Anthea, concluding — 

" Thou art my life, my love, my heart, 
i The very eyes of me ; 

And hast command of every part, 
To live and die for thee." 

JBut his beauties are so deeply involved in surrounding coarse- 
>j ness and extravagance, as to constitute not a tenth part of his 
I poetry ; or rather it may be safely affirmed, that, of 1400 pages 
I of verse which he has left, not a hundred are worth reading. 
i In Milton there may be traced obligations to several minor 
j English poets; but his genius had too great a supremacy to 
I belong to any school. Though he acknowledged a filial rever- 
j ence for Spenser as a poet, he left no Gothic irregular tracery 
, in the design of his own great work, but gave a classical har- 
' mony of parts to its stupendous pile. It thus resembles a dome, 
the vastness of which is at first sight concealed by its symmetry, 
but which expands more and more to the eye while it is contem- 
plated. His early poetry seems to have neither disturbed nor 
corrected the bad taste of his age. * Comus' came into the world 
unacknowledged by its author, and ^ Lycidas' appeared at first only 
with his initials.* These, and other exquisite pieces, composed 
in the happiest years of his life, at his father's country-house at 
Horton, were collectively published, with his name affixed to 
them, in 1645 ; but that precious volume, which included 
' L' Allegro' and ' II Penseroso,' did not come to a second edition 
till it was republished by himself at the distance of eight-and- 
twenty years."]" Almost a century elapsed before his minor 
works obtained their proper fame. Handel's music is said, by 
Dr. Warton, to have drawn the first attention to them ; but they 
must have been admired before Handel set them to music, for 
he was assuredly not the first to discover their beauty. But of 
Milton's poetry being above the comprehension of his age we 
should have a sufficient proof, if we had no other, in the grave 
remark of Lord Clarendon, that Cowley had in his time ^' taken 
a flight above all men in poetry J^ Even when ' Paradise Lost' 
appeared, though it was not neglected, it attracted no crowd of 
imitators, and made no visible change in the poetical practice of 
the age. He stood alone and aloof above his times, the bard 

* [Comus, 1637— Lycidas, 1638.] t [1673.] 

H 



98 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part laa ^ 

■ __ ^ 

of immortal subjects, and, as far as there is perpetuity in lain ^ 
guage, of immortal fame. The very choice of those subjectiti 
bespoke a contempt for any species of excellence that was attaiprr i 
able by other men. There is something that overawes the mind v 
in conceiving his long-deliberated selection of that theme — hii i 
attempting it when his eyes were shut upon the face of nature—* i 
his dependence, we might almost say, on supernatural inspiration, i 
and in the calm air of strength mth which he opens ' Paradise ■: 
Lost,' beginning a mighty performance without the appearance i 
of an effort.* Taking the subject all in all, his powers could i 
nowhere else have enjoyed the same scope. It was only from the 
height of this great argument that he could look back upon t 
eternity past, and forward upon eternity to come ; that he could 
survey the abyss of infernal darkness, open visions of Paradise, 
or ascend to heaven and breathe empyreal air. Still the subject ■ 
had precipitous difficulties. It obliged him to relinquish the ] 
warm, multifarious interests of human life. For these indeed 
he could substitute holier things ; but a more insuperable objec- 
tion to the theme was, that it involved the representation of a 
war between the Almighty and his created beings. To the 
vicissitudes of such a warfare it was impossible to make us attach 
the same fluctuations of hope and fear, the same curiosity, sus- , 
pense, and sympathy, which we feel amidst the battles of the 
'Iliad,' and which make every brave young spirit long to be inj 
the midst of them. 

Milton has certainly triumphed over one difficulty of his sub- 
ject — the paucity and the loneliness of its human agents ; for 
no one in contemplating the garden of Eden would wish to 
exchange it for a more populous world. His earthly pair could 
only be represented, during their innocence, as beings of simple 

* [There is a solemnity of sentiment, as well as majesty of numbers, in 
the exordium of this noble poem, which in the works of the ancients has no 

example We cannot read this exordium without perceiving that the 

author possesses more fire than he shows. There is a suppressed force in it, 
the effect of judgment. His judgment controls his genius, and his genius 
reminds us (to use his own beautiful similitude) of 

" A proud steed rein'd, 
Champing his iron curb." 

He addresses himself to the performance of great things, but makes no 
jireat exertion in doing it, a sure symptom of uncommon vigour. — Cowper, 
Commentari/.'} 



J PART III.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 99 

-j enjoyment and negative virtue, with no other passions than the 
fear of Heaven and the love of each other. Yet, from these 
materials, what a picture has he drawn of their homage to the 

f| Deity, their mutual affection, and the horrors of their alienation ! 
By concentrating all exquisite ideas of external nature in the 
representation of their abode — by conveying an inspired impres- 
sion of their spirits and forms, whilst they first shone under the 
fresh light of creative Heaven — by these powers of description, he 

■ links our first parents, in harmonious subordination, to the angelic 
natures — he supports them in the balance of poetical importance 

'I with their divine coadjutors and enemies, and makes them appear 

i at once worthy of the friendship and envy of gods. 

.1 In the angelic warfare of the poem, Milton has done whatever 

\ human genius could accomplish. But, although Satan speaks of 
having " put to proof his [Maker's] high supremacy, in dubious 
battle, on the plains of heaven," the expression, though finely 
characteristic of his blasphemous pride, does not prevent us from 
feeling that the battle cannot for a moment be dubious. Whilst 
the powers of description and language are taxed and exhausted 
to portray the combat, it is impossible not to feel, with regard to 
the blessed spirits, a profound and reposing security that they 
have neither great dangers to fear, nor reverses to suffer. At 
the same time it must be said that, although in the actual contact 
of the armies the inequality of the strife becomes strongly visible 
to the imagination, and makes it a contest more of noise than 
terror, yet, while positive action is suspended, there is a warlike 
grandeur in the poem which is nowhere to be paralleled. When 
Milton's genius dares to invest the Almighty himself with arms, 
" his bow and thunder," the astonished mind admits the image 
with a momentary credence.* It is otherwise when we are in- 
volved in the circumstantial details of the campaign. We have 
then leisure to anticipate its only possible issue, and can feel no 
alarm for any temporary check that may be given to those who 
fight under the banners of Omnipotence. The warlike part of 
' Paradise Lost ' was inseparable from its subject. Whether it 
could have been differently managed, is a problem which our 
reverence for Milton will scarcely permit us to state. I feel that 

* [Book vi. 1. 712. The how and sword of the Almighty are copied from 
Psalms vii. and xlv.] 

H 2 



100 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part idl , 

__ ^ _ . 3. } 

reverence too strongly to suggest even the possibility that Milton 
could have improved his poem by having thrown his angelic 
warfare into more remote perspective ; but it seems to me to hk ' 
most sublime when it is least distinctly brought home to the 
imagination. What an awful effect has the dim and undefined 
conception of the conflict which we gather from the opening of 
the first book! There the veil of mystery is left undrawn 
between us and a subject which the powers of description were 
inadequate to exhibit. The ministers of divine vengeance and 
pursuit had been recalled — the thunders had ceased 

" To bellow through the vast and boundless deep" — 

Book i. V. 177— 

(in that line what an image of sound and space is conveyed !) * 
— and our terrific conception of the past is deepened by its indis- 
tinctness. t In optics there are some phenomena which are , 
beautifully deceptive at a certain distance, but which lose their 
illusive charm on the slightest approach to them that changes 
the light and position in which they are viewed. Something like 
this takes place in the phenomena of fanc)^ The array of the 
fallen angels in hell — the unfurling of the standard of Satan — 
and the march of his troops 

" In perfect phalanx, to the Dorian mood 
Of tiutes and soft recorders" — Book i. 1. 550 — 

all this human pomp and circumstance of war is magic and 
overwhelming illusion. The imagination is taken by surprise. 
But the noblest efforts of language are tried with very unequal 
effect to interest us in the immediate and close view of the battle 
itself in the sixth book ; and the martial demons, who charmed 
us in the shades of hell, lose some portion of their sublimity when 
their artillery is discharged in the daylight of heaven. 

* [In this line we seem to hear a thunder suited both to the scene and 
the occasion, incomparably more awful than any ever heard on earth. The i 
thunder of Milton is not hurled from the hand like Homer's, but discharged 
like an arrow ; as if jealous for the honour of a true God, the poet disdained 
to arm him like the God of the heathen. — Cowper.'] 

f [Of all the articles of which the dreadful scenery of Milton's hell con- 
sists, Scripture furnished him only with a lake of fire and brimstone. Yet 
thus slenderly assisted, what a world of woe has he constructed, proved, in 
this single instance, the most creative that ever poet owned! — Cowper. 

The slender materials for ' Comus ' and ' Paradise Regained ' are alike 
•wonderful, and attest the truth of Cowper's remark.] 



PART III.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 101 

' If we call diction the garb of thought, Milton, in his style, 
raay be said to wear the costume of sovereignty. The idioms 
even of foreign languages contributed to adorn it. He was the 
most learned of poets ; yet his learning interferes not with his 
substantial English purity.* His simplicity is unimpaired by 
glowing ornament, like the bush in the sacred flame, which burnt 
but " was not consumed." 

In delineating the blessed spirits, Milton has exhausted all the 
j conceivable variety that could be given to pictures of unshaded 
sanctity ; but it is chiefly in those of the fallen angels that his 
excellence is conspicuous above everything ancient or modern. 
Tasso had, indeed, portrayed an infernal council, and had given 
the hint to our poet of ascribing the origin of pagan worship to 
those reprobate spirits. But how poor and squalid, in compa- 
rison of the Miltonic Pandaemonium, are the Scyllas, the Cy- 
clopses, and the Chimeras of the Infernal Council of the ' Jeru- 
salem' ! Tasso's conclave of fiends is a den of ugly incongruous 
monsters : — 

" O come strane, o come orribil forme ! 

Quant e negli occhi lor terror, e morte ! 

Stampano alcuni il suol di ferine orme 

E'n fronte umaua han chiome d' angui attorte 

E lor s'aggira dietro immensa loda 

Che quasi sferza si ripiega, e snoda. 

Qui mille immonde Arpie vedestri, e mille 

Centauri, e Sfingi, e pallide Gorgoni, 

Molte e molte latrar voraci Scille 

E fischiar Idre, e sibilar Pitoni, 

E vomitar Chimere atre faville 

E Polifemi orrendi, e Gerioni. 

* * * * * " 

La Gerusalemvie, canto iv. 

The powers of Milton's hell are godlike shapes and forms. 

Their appearance dwarfs every other poetical conception, when 

we turn our dilated eyes from contemplating them. It is not 

their external attributes alone which expand the imagination, but 

their souls, which are as colossal as their stature — their *' thoughts 

that wander through eternity ^^ — the pride that burns amidst 

* [Our most learned poets were classed by Joseph Warton, a very com- 
petent judge, in the following order: — 1. Milton. 2. Jonson. 3. Gray. 
4. Akenside. Milton and Gray were of Cambridge ; Ben Jonson was a very 
short time there, not long enough however to catch much of the learning of 
the place; but Akenside was of no college — it is believed self-taught.] 



102 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part iil 

the ruins of their divine natures — and their g-enius, that 
feels with the ardour and debates with the eloquence of ^ 
heaven. 

The subject of ' Paradise Lost ' was the origin of evil — an er^ 
in existence — an event more than all others dividing past from 
future time — an isthmus in the ocean of eternity. The theme 
was in its nature connected with everything important in the 
circumstances of human history ; and amidst these circumstances 
Milton saw that the fables of Paganism were too important and ' 
poetical to be omitted. As a Christian, he was entitled wholly ■ 
to neglect them ; but as a poet, he chose to treat them, not as ' 
dreams of the human mind, but as the delusions of infernal exist- 
ences. Thus anticipating a beautiful propriety for all classical 
allusions, thus connecting and reconciling the co-existence of 
£able and of truth, and thus identifying the fallen angels with the 
deities of " gay religions, full of pomp and gold," he yoked the 
heathen mythology in triumph to his subject, and clothed him- 
self in the spoils of superstition. 

One eminent production of wit, namely, * Hudibras,' may be 
said to have sprmig out of the Restoration, or at least out of the 
contempt of fanaticism, which had its triumph in that event; 
otherwise, the return of royalty contributed as little to improve 
the taste as the morality of the public. The drama degenerated, 
owing, as we are generally told, to the influence of French lite- 
rature, although some infection from the Spanish stage might 
also be taken into the account. Sir William Davenant, who 
presided over the first revival of the theatre, was a man of cold 
and didactic spirit ; he created an era in the machinery, costume, 
and ornaments of the stage, but he was only fitted to be its me- 
chanical benefactor. Dryden, who could do even bad things 
with a good grace, confirmed the taste for rhyming and ranting 
tragedy. Two beautiful plays of Otway formed an exception to 
this degeneracy ; but Otway was cut off in the spring-tide of his 
genius, and his early death was, according to every appearance, 
a heavy loss to our drama. It has been alleged, indeed, in the 
present day, that Otway 's imagination showed no prognostics of 
great future achievements ; but when I remember ' Venice Pre- 
served ' and ' The Orphan,' as the works of a man of thirty, I can 



J PART III.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 103 

,! treat this opinion no otherwise than to dismiss it as an idle 
i| assertion.* t, / wn ^^ " 

I BacTK Wi, ov\e vu€ipe. 

I During the last thirty years of the seventeenth century, 

I Dryden was seldom long absent from the view of the public, and 

' he alternately swayed and humoured its predilections. Whatever 

I may be said of his accommodating and fluctuating theories of 

I criticism, his perseverance in training and disciplining his own 

faculties is entitled to much admiration. He strengthened his mind 

by action, and fertilized it by production. In his old age he 

renewed his youth, like the eagle ; or rather his genius acquired 

stronger wings than it had ever spread. He rose and fell, it is 

true, in the course of his poetical career ; but upon the whole it 

was a career of improvement to the very last.f Even in the 

drama, which was not his natural province, his good sense came 

at last so far in aid of his deficient sensibility, that he gave up 

his system of rhyming tragedy, and adopted Shakspeare (in 

theory at least) for his model. In poetry not belonging to the 

drama, he was at first an admirer of Cowley, then of Davenant ; 

and ultimately he acquired a manner above the peculiarities of 

either.J The Odes and Fables of his latest volume surpass 

whatever he had formerly written. § He was satirized and abused 

* [The talents of Otway, in his scenes of passionate affection, rival at 
least, and sometimes excel, those of Shakspeare. More tears have been 
shed, probably, for the sorrows of Belvidera and Monimia, than for those of 
Juliet and Desdemona.— Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 
356.] 

+ [Shakspeare died at fifty-two. The average probability of life is twenty 
years beyond that age, and the probable endurance of the human faculties 
in their vigour is not a great deal shorter. Chaucer wrote his best poetry 
after he was sixty ; Dryden when he was seventy. Cowper was also late in 
his poetical maturity ; and Young never wrote anything that could be called 
poetry till he was a sexagenarian. Sophocles wrote his ' (Edipus Coloneus* 
certainly beyond the age of eighty. But the pride of England, it may be 
said, died in the prime of life. — Campbell, Shakspeare, 8vo. 1838, p. Ixv.] 

X [Dryden tells us that Cowley and Sylvester were the darling writers of 
his youth ; and that Davenant introduced him to the folio of Shakspeare's 
plays. He lived long enough to dethrone Sylvester, to lessen his esteem for 
Cowley, and increase his predilection for Shakspeare ; his taste was bettering 
to the last — ^but it was long in arriving to maturity. Like Sir Walter Scott, 
he was nearer forty than thirty before he had distinguished himself — an age 
at which both Burns and Byron were in their graves.] 

§ [I think Dryden' s translations from Boccace are the best, at least the 
most poetical, of his poems. But as a poet he is no great favourite of mine. 
I admire his talents and genius highly, but his is not a poetical genius. The. 



104 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part ii5 « 

^ I 

as well as extolled by his contemporaries ; but bis genius wa« i 
neither to be discouraged by the severity, nor spoilt by the favourf 
of criticism. It flourished alike in the sunshine and the stormj ; 
and its fruits improved as they multiplied in profusion. When 
we view him out of the walk of purely original composition, it is" 
not a paradox to say, that, though he is one of the greatest artists 
in language, and perhaps the greatest of English translators, he 
nevertheless attempted one task in which his failure is at least 
as conspicuous as his success. But that task was the translation 
of Virgil ; and it is not lenity, but absolute justice, that requires 
us to make a very large and liberal allowance for whatever defi- 
ciencies he may show in transfusing into a language less harmo- 
nious and flexible than the Latin, the sense of that poet who, in 
the history of the world, has had no rival in beauty of expression. 
Dryden renovates Chaucer's thoughts, and fills up Boccaccio's 
narrative outline with many improving touches : and though 
paraphrase suited his free spirit better than translation, yet even 
in versions of Horace and Juvenal he seizes the classical character 
of Latin poetry with a boldness and dexterity which are all his 
own. But it was easier for him to emulate the strength of 
Juvenal than the serene majesty of Virgil. His translation of 
Virgil is certainly^ an inadequate representation of the Roman 
poet. It is often bold and graceful, and generally idiomatic and 
easy ; but, though the spirit of the original is not lost, it is sadly 

only qualities I can find in Dryden that are essentially poetical are a certain 
ardour and impetuosity of mind, with an excellent ear. It may seem strange 
that I do not add to this, great command of language ; that he certainly has, 
and of such language too as it is desirable that a poet should possess, or 
rather that he should not be without. But it is not language that is, in the 
highest sense of the word, poetical, being neither of the imagination nor of 
the passions ; I mean the amiable, the ennobling, or the intense passions. 
I do not mean to say that there is nothing of this in Dryden, but as little I 
think as is possible, considering how much he has written. You will easily 
understand my meaning, when I refer to his versification of ' Palamon and 
Arcite,' as contrasted with the language of Chaucer. Dryden had neither a 
tender heart nor a lofty sense of moral dignity. Whenever his language is 
poetically impassioned, it is mostly upon uupleasing subjects, such as the 
follies, vices, and crimes of classes of men or of individuals. That his can- 
not be the language of imagination must have necessarily followed from 
this — that there is not a single image from nature in the whole body of his 
works ; and in his translation from Virgil, wherever Virgil can be fairly 
said to have his eye upon his object, Dryden always spoils the passage. His 
love is nothing but sensuality and appetite ; he had no other notion of the 
passion. — Wordsworth, Lockhart's Life of Scott, vol. ii. p. 287, sec. ed.] 



JPAKT III.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 105 

iaud unequally diffused. Nor is it only in the magic of words, in 
I the exquisite structure and rich economy of expression, that 
IDryden (as we might expect) falls beneatli Virgil, but we too 
I often feel the inequality of his vital sensibility as a poet. Too 
I frequently, when the Roman classic touches the heart, or embo- 
I dies to our fancy those noble images to which nothing could be 
! added, and from which nothing can be taken away, we are sensible 
jof the distance between Dryden's talent and Virgil's inspiration. 
! One passage out of many — the representation of Jupiter, in the 
I first book of the * Georgics ' — may show this difference : — 
I GEORGICS, lib. i. 1. 328. 

" Ipse Pater, media nimborum in nocte, corusca 
Fulmina molitur dextra : quo maxima motu 
Terra tremit, fugere ferjB, et mortalia corda 
Per geutes humilis stravit pavor " 

" The father of the gods his glory shrouds. 
Involved in tempests and a night of clouds, 
And from the middle darkness flashing out, 
By fits he deals his fiery bolts about. 
Earth feels the motion of her angry god, 
Her entrails tremble, and her mountains nod, 
And flying beasts in forests seek abode : 
Deep horror seizes every human breast, 
Their pride is humbled, and their fear confess'd." 

Virgil's three lines and a half might challenge the most sublime 
pencil of Italy to the same subject. His words are no sooner 
read than, with the rapidity of light, they collect a picture before 
the mind which stands confessed in all its parts. There is no 
interval between the objects as they are presented to our percep- 
tion. At one and the same moment we behold the form, the 
uplifted arm, and dazzling thunderbolts of Jove, amidst a night 
of clouds ; — the earth trembling, and the wild beasts scudding 
for shelter — -fugere — they have vanished while the poet describes 
them, and we feel that mortal hearts are laid prostrate with 
fear throughout the nations. Dryden, in the translation, has 
done his best, and some of his lines roll on with spirit and dignity ; 
but the whole description is a process rather than a picture — the 
instantaneous effect, the electric unity of the original, is lost. 
Jupiter has leisure to deal out his fiery bolts by fits, while the 
entrails of the earth shake and her mountains nod, and the flying 
beasts have time to look out very quietly for lodgings in the 
forest. The weakness of the two last lines, which stand for the 



106 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part mi 

weighty words ^^ Mortalia cor da per gentes humilis strwMi 
pavor,'' need not be pointed out. i 

I cannot quote this passage without recurring to the recollect- j 
tion, already suggested, that it was Virgil with whom the - 
English translator had to contend. Dryden's admirers might, 
undoubtedly quote many passages much more in his favour ; and i 
one passage occurs to me as a striking example of his felicity, i 
In the following lines (with the exception of one) we recognise 
a great poet, and can scarcely acknowledge that he is translating 
a greater : — * 

^NEID, lib. xii. 1. 331. 
" Qualis apud gelidi cum flumina concitus Hebri 
Sanguineus Mavors clipeo intonatf atque furentes 
Bella movens immittit equos, illi sequore aperto 
Ante Notos Zephyrumpue volant, gemit ultima pulsu 
Thraca pedum, circumque atrae Formidinis ora, 
Ira, insidiseque, Dei comitatus aguntur " 

" Thus, on the banks of Hebrus' freezing flood, 
The god of battles, in his angry mood, ^ 

Clashing his sword against his brazen shield, i 

Lets loose the reins, and scours along the field : 
Before the wind his fiery coursers fly, 
Groans the sad earth, resounds the rattling sky ; 
Wrath, terror, treason, tumult, and despair, 
Dire faces and deform'd, surround the car. 
Friends of the god, and followers of the war." , 

If it were asked how far Dryden can strictly be called an in- 
ventive poet, his drama certainly would not furnish many in- 
stances of characters strongly designed ; though his Spanish 
Friar is by no means an insipid personage in comedy. The con- ■: 

* [He who sits down to Dryden's translation of Virgil, with the original !j 
text spread before him, will be at no loss to point out many passages that : 
are faulty, many indifferently understood, many imperfectly translated, 1 
some in which dignity is lost, others in which bombast is substituted in its : 
stead. But the unabated vigour and spirit of the version more than over- ^ 
balance these and all its other deficiencies. A sedulous scholar might often : 
approach more nearly to the dead letter of Virgil, and give an exact, dis- 
tinct, sober-minded idea of the meaning and scope of particular passag^. 
Trapp, Pitt, and others have done so. But the essential spirit of poetry is 
so volatile, that it escapes during such an operation, like the life of the poor ^ 
criminal, whom the ancient anatomist is said to have dissected alive, in order : 
to ascertain the seat of the soul. The carcase, indeed, is presented to the 
English reader, but the animating vigour is no more. — Sir Walter Scott, 
Life of Dryden.'] 

t Intondt. I follow Wakefield's edition of Virgil in preference to others, 
which have *' increpat." 



LjpART HI.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 107 

jtrivance, in ' The Hind and Panther/ of beasts disputing about 

jjeligion, if it were his own, would do little honour to his inge- 

inuity. The idea, in * Absalom and Achitophel,' of couching 

i;!niodern characters under Scripture names, was adopted from one 

iof the Puritan writers; yet there is so much ingenuity evinced 

!|in supporting the parallel, and so admirable a gallery of portraits 

displayed in the work, as to render that circumstance insignificant 

ij.with regard to its originality.* Nor, though his Fables are 

!j borrowed, can we regard him with much less esteem than if he 

had been their inventor. He is a writer of manly and elastic 

character. His strong judgment gave force as well as direction 

to a flexible fancy ; and his harmony is generally the echo of 

solid thoughts-t But he was not gifted with intense or lofty 

sensibility ; on the contrary, the grosser any idea is, the happier 

* [The plan of ' Absalom and Achitophel * was not new to the public. A 
Catholic poet had, in 1679, paraphrased the Scriptural story of Naboth's 
Vineyard, and applied it to the condemnation of Lord Stafford on account 
of the Popish plot. This poem is written in the style of a Scriptural allu- 
sion ; the names and situations of personages in the holy text being applied 
to those contemporaries to whom the author assigned a place in his piece. 
Neither was the obvious application of the story of 'Absalom and Achitophel ' 
to the persons of Monmouth and Shaftesbury first made by our poet. A 
prose paraphrase, published in 1680, had already been composed upon this 
allusion. But the vigour of the satire, the happy adaptation, not only of 
the incidents but of the very names, to the individuals characterised, gave 
Dry den's poem the full effect of novelty.— Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Prose 
Works, vol. i. p. 208.] 

I [The distinguishing characteristic of Dryden's genius seems to have 
been the power of reasoning, and of expressing the result in appropriate 

language The best of Dryden's performances in the more pui'e and 

chaste style of tragedy are unquestionably ' Don Sebastian,' and ' All for 
Love.* Of these, the former is in the poet's very best manner ; exhibiting 
dramatic persons, consisting of such bold and impetuous characters as he 
delighted to draw, well -contrasted, forcibly marked, and engaged in an 
interesting succession of events. To many tempers, the scene between 
Sebastian and Dorax must appear one of the most moving that ever adorned 

the British stage The satirical powers of Dryden were of the highest 

order. He draws his arrow to the head, and dismisses it straight upon his 

object of aim The occasional poetry of Dryden is marked strongly 

by masculine character. The epistles vary with the subject ; and ai'e light, 
humorous, and satirical, or grave, argumentative, and philosophical, as the 

case required Few of his elegiac effusions seem prompted by sincere 

sorrow. That to Oldham may be an exception ; but even there he rather 
strives to do honour to the talents of his departed friend, than to pour out 

lamentations for his loss No author, excepting Pope, has done so 

much to endenizen the eminent poets of antiquity. — Sir Walter Scott, Life of 
Dryden.'] 



i 



108 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [past i ^ 

Tfjs 

he seems to expatiate upon it. The transports of the heart, ajoj^lj 
the deep and varied delineations of the passions, are strangers to^ 
his poetry. He could describe character in the abstract, bu| 
could not embody it in the drama, for he entered into character 
more from clear perception than fervid sympathy. This great 
High Priest of all the Nine was not a confessor to the finer 
secrets of the human breast. Had the subject of Eloisa fallen 
into his hands, he would have left but a coarse draught of her 
passion.* 

Dryden died in the last year of the seventeenth century. In 
the intervening period between his death and the meridian of 
Pope's reputation, we may be kept in good humour with the 
archness of Prior and the wit of Swift. Parnell was the most 
elegant rhymist of Pope's early contemporaries ; and Rowe, if 
he did not bring back the full fire of the drama, at least pre« 
served its vestal spark from being wholly extinguished. There 
are exclusionists in taste, who think that they cannot speak with 
sufficient disparagement of the English poets of the first part of 

* [Writing of Pope's * Eloisa,' Lord Byron says, " The licentiousness of 
the story was not Pope's — it was a fact. All that it had of gross he has 
softened ; all that it had of indelicate he has purified ; all that it had of 
passionate he has beautified ; all that it had of holy he has hallowed. Mr. 
Campbell has admirably marked this, in a few words (I quote from memory), 
in drawing the distinction between Pope and Dryden, and pointing out 
•where Dryden was wanting. ' I fear,' says he, ' that had the subject of 
Eloisa fallen into his (Dryden' s) hands, that he would have given us but 
a coarse draft of her passion.' " 

This is very generally admitted. "The love of the senses," writes Sir 
Walter Scott, " he (Dryden) has in many places expressed in as forcible and 
dignified colouring as the subject could admit ; but of a more moral and 
sentimental passion he seems to have had little idea, since he frequently 
substitutes in its place the absurd, unnatural, and fictitious refinements of 
romance. In short, his love is always indecorous nakedness, or sheathed 
in the stiff panoply of chivalry. The most pathetic verses which Dryden 
has composed are unquestionably contained in his ' Epistle to Congreve,' 
where he recommends his laurels, in such moving terms, to the care of his 
surviving friend. The quarrel and reconciliation of Sebastian and Dorax is 
also full of the noblest emotion. In both cases, however, the interest is 
excited by means of masculine and exalted passion, uot of those which arise 
from the more delicate sensibilities of our nature." 

It is upon this passage that Mr. Lockhart remarks, — " The reader who 
wishes to see the most remarkable instances of Dryden "s deficiency in the 
pathetic is requested to compare him with Chaucer in the death-bed scene 
of ' Palamon and Arcite.' '" — Scott's 3Iisc. Prose Works, vol. i. p. 409. 

" Remember Dryden," Gray writes to Beattie, " and be blind to all his 
faults."] 



\tart III.] EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 109 

'I- _ 

the eighteenth century ; and they are armed with a noble provo- 
'cative to English contempt, when they have it to say that those 
Ipoets belong to a French school. Indeed Dryden himself is 
•generally included in that school, though more genuine English 
is to be found in no man's pages. But in poetry " there are 
many mansions." I am free to confess that I can pass from the 
elder writers, and still find a charm in the correct and equable 
sweetness of Parnell. Conscious that his diction has not the 
freedom and volubility of the better strains of the elder time, I 
cannot but remark his exemption from the quaintness and false 
metaphor which so often disfigure the style of the preceding age ; 
nor deny my respect to the select choice of his expression, the 

I clearness and keeping of his imagery, and the pensive dignity of 

I his moral feeling. 

Pope gave our heroic couplet its strictest melody and tersest 
expression. 

" D'un mot mis en sa place il enseigne le pouvoir." 

If his contemporaries forgot other poets in admiring him, let 
I him not be robbed of his just fame on pretence that a part of it 
was superfluous. The public ear was long fatigued with repe- 
titions of his manner ; but if we place ourselves in the situation 
of those to whom his brilliancy, succinctness, and animation 
were wholly new, we cannot wonder at their being captivated to 
the fondest admiration. In order to do justice to Pope, we should 
forget his imitators, if that were possible ; but it is easier to re- 
member than to forget by an effort — to acquire associations than 
to shake them off. Every one may recollect how often the most 
beautiful air has palled upon his ear, and grown insipid, from 
being played or sung by vulgar musicians. It is the same thing 
with regard to Pope's versification.* That his peculiar rhythm 
and manner are the very best in the whole range of our poetry 

* [No two great writers ever wrote blank verse with pauses and cadences 
the same. Shakspeare, Jonson. Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford, 
had a dramatic blank verse of their own. Milton's manner of verse is his 
own, so is Thomson's, Akenside's, Cowper's, Southey's, Wordsworth's. 
With our couplet verse it is the same. Denham and Waller are unlike 
Dryden. Prior is diflPerent again. Pope's strictness and terseness are his 
own. Who is Goldsmith like, or Falconer, or Rogers, or Campbell himself? 
Inferior writers imitate — men of genius" strike out a path for themselves ; 
their numbers are all their own, like their thoughts.] 



1 



110 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [part m.t 

need not be asserted. He has a gracefully peculiar manner, 
though it is not calculated to be an universal one; and where, 
indeed, shall we find the style of poetry that could be pronounced 
an exclusive model for every composer ? His pauses have little 
variety, and his phrases are too much weighed in the balance <rfij 
antithesis. But let us look to the spirit that points his antithesii^il 
and to the rapid precision of his thoughts, and we shall forgive 
him for being too antithetic and sententious. 

Pope's works have been twice given to the world by editors 
who cannot be taxed with the slightest editorial partiality towards 
his fame. The last of these is the Rev. Mr. Bowles,* in speak- 
ing of whom I beg leave most distinctly to disclaim the slightest 
intention of undervaluing his acknowledged merit as a poet, 
however freely and fully I may dissent from his critical estimate 
of the genius of Pope. Mr. Bowles, in forming this estimate, 
lays great stress upon the argument that Pope's images are '^i 
drawn from art more than from nature. That Pope was neither 
so insensible to the beauties of nature, nor so indistinct in de- 
scribing them, as to forfeit the character of a genuine poet, is 
what 1 mean to urge, without exaggerating his picturesqueness. 
But before speaking of that quality in his writings, I would beg 
leave to observe, in the first place, that the faculty by which a 
poet luminously describes objects of art is essentially the same 
faculty which enables him to be a faithful describer of simple 
nature ; in the second place, that nature and art are to a greater 
degree relative terms in poetical description than is generally 
recollected ; and, thirdly, that artificial objects and manners are 
of so much importance in fiction, as to make the exquisite de- i 
scription of them no less characteristic of genius than the descrip- [ 
tion of simple physical appearances. The poet is •' creation's 
heir." He deepens our social interest in existence. It is surely 
by the liveliness of the interest which he excites in existence, 
and not by the class of subjects which he chooses, that we most 
fairly appreciate the genius or the life of life which is in him. 

* [Mr. Campbell -wrote this in 1819; and in 1824 the late Mr. Eoscoe 
gave another edition of Pope, but not the edition that is -wanted. Mr. 
Bowles -was one of Joseph Warton's Winchester -wonders ; and the taste he 
imbibed there for the romantic school of poetry -was strengthened and con- 
firmed by his removal to Trinity College, Oxford, when Tom Warton -was 
residing there.] 



pAiiTiii.] EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Ill 

It is no irreverence to the external charms of nature to say, that 
they are not more important to a poet's study than the manners 
and affections of his species. Nature is the poet's goddess ; but 
by nature no one rightly understands her mere inanimate face 
— however charming it may be — or the simple landscape painting 
of trees, clouds, precipices, and flowers. Why then try Pope, 
or any other poet, exclusively by his powers of describing inani- 
mate phenomena ? Nature, in the wide and proper sense of the 
word, means life in all its circumstances — nature moral as well 
as external. As the subject of inspired fiction, nature includes 
artificial forms and manners. Richardson is no less a painter of 
nature than Homer. Homer himself is a minute describer of 
works of art ;* and Milton is full of imagery derived from it. 
Satan's spear is compared to the pine that makes " the mast of 
some great ammiral," and his shield is like the moon, but like 
the moon artificially seen through the glass of the Tuscan artist.j 

* [But are his descriptions of works of art more poetical than his descrip- 
tions of the great feelings of nature ? — Bowles's Invariable Principles, p. 15.] 

•f [ " His ponderous shield, 

Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round, 
Behind him cast ; the broad circumference 
Hung on his shoulders, like the moon, whose orb 
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views 
At evening, from the top of Fesole, 
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, 
Rivers, or mountains, on her spotty globe. 
His spear, to equal which the tallest pines, 
Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast 
Of some great ammiral, were but a wand." 

Par. Lost, b. 1. 

It is evident that Satan's spear is not compared to the mast of some great 
ammiral, though his shield is to the moon as seen through the glass of Ga- 
lileo. Milton's original (Cowley), whose images from art are of constant 
occurrence, draws his description of Goliah's spear from Norwegian hills : — 

" His spear the trunk was of a lofty tree 
Which Nature meant some tall ship's mast should be." 

The poetry of the whole passage in Milton is in the images and names from 
nature, not from art — " It is Fesole and Valdarno that are poetical," says 
Mr. Bowles, " not the telescope." There is a spell, let us add, in the very 
names of Fesole and Valdarno. 

Milton's object in likening the shield of Satan to the moon, as seen 
through the glass of the Tuscan artist, was to give the clearest possible im- 
pression of the thing alluded to. " It is by no means necessary," says 
Cowper, " that a simile should be more magnificent than the subject ; it is 



112 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [pakt ra. 

The " spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, the royal banner, 
and all quality, pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war,"* 
are all artificial images. When Shakspeare groups into one 
view the most sublime objects of the universe, he fixes first 
on " the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn , 
temples."! Those who have ever witnessed the spectacle of the v 
launching of a ship of the line will perhaps forgive me for add- 
ing this to the examples of the sublime objects of artificial life. 
Of that spectacle I can never forget the impression, and of 
having witnessed it reflected from the faces of ten thousand 
spectators. They seem yet before me — I sympathise with their 
deep and silent expectation, and with their final burst of enthu- i 
siasm. It was not a vulgar joy, but an affecting national solem- 
nity. When the vast bulwark sprang from her cradle, the calm j 
water on which she swung majestically round gave the imagina^ i 
tion a contrast of the stormy element on which she was soon to 1 
ride. All the days of battle and the nights of danger which she ^ 

had to encounter, all the ends of the earth which she had to - 

"•I 
visit, and all that she had to do and to suffer for her country, j, 

rose in awful presentiment before the mind ; and when the heart 

enough that it gives us a clearer and more distinct perception of it than we . 
could have had ■without it. Were it the indispensable duty of a simile to 
elevate as well as to illustrate, -what must be done with many of Homer's ? 
When he compares the Grecian troops, pouring themselves forth from camp 
and fleet in the plain of Troy, to bees issuing from a hollow rock — or the 
body of Patroclus in dispute between the two armies to an ox-hide larded 
and stretched by the currier — we must condemn him utterly as guilty of : 
degrading his subject when he should exalt it. But the exaltation of his 
subject was no part of Homer's concern on these occasions ; he intended 
nothing more than the clearest possible impression of it on the minds of his 
hearers." — Cowper's Works, hy Southey, vol. xv. p. 321. 

When Johnson, in his ' Life of Gray,' laid it down as a rule that an 
epithet or metaphor drawn from Nature ennobles Art, an epithet or meta- 
phor drawn from Art degrades Nature, he had forgotten Homer, and the 
custom of all our poets,] 

* \_Othello, act iii. scene iii.] 

t [37je Tempest, act iv. scene i. One of the finest passages in Shakspeare 
is where he describes Fortune as a wheelwright would : — 

" Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune ! All you gods, 
In general synod, take away her power ; 
Break all the spohes and fellies from her tcheel. 
And bowl the round ?inve down the hill of heaven, 
As low as to the fiends." — Hamlet, act ii. scene ii.]" 



r ART III.] EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 113 

grave her a benediction, it was like one pronounced on a living 
being.* 

Pope, while he is a great moral writer, though not elaborately 
picturesque, is by no means deficient as a painter of interesting 
external objects. No one will say that he peruses Eloisa's 
Epistle without a solemn impression of the pomp of Catholic 
superstition. In familiar description nothing can be more dis- 

* [In the controversy which Mr. Campbell's * Specimens ' gave rise to, Mr. 
Bowles contended for this—" Whether poetry be more immediately indebted 
to what is sublime or beautiful in the works of Nature or the works of Art ?" 
and taking Nature to himself, he argued that Mr. Campbell's ship had 
greater obligations to nature than to art for its poetic excellences, " It was 
indebted to nature," he writes, " for the winds that filled the «ails ; for the 
sunshine that touched them with light ; for the waves on which it so tri- 
umphantly rode ; for the associated ideas of the distant regions of the earth 
it was to visit, the tempests it was to encounter ; and for being, as it were, 
endued with existence — a thing of life." 

" Mr. Bowles asserts," says Lord Byron, " that Campbell's ship of the 
line derives all its poetry, not from art, but from nature. ' Take away 
the waves, the winds, the sun, &c. &c., one will become a stripe of blue 
bunting, and the other a piece of coarse canvas on three tall poles.' Very 
true : take away the waves, the winds, and there will be no ship at all, not 
only for poetical, but for any other purpose : and take away the sun, and we 
must read Mr. Bowles's pamphlet by candle-light. But the poetry of the 
ship does not depend on the waves. Sec. ; on the contrary, the ship of the 
line confers its own poetry upon the waters, and heightens theirs. What 
was it attracted the thousands to the launch ? They might have seen the 
poetical calm water at Wapping, or in the London Dock, or in the Padding- 
ton Canal, or in a horse-pond, or in a slop-basin, or in any other vase ! Mr. 
Bowles contends," Lord Byron goes on to say, " that the pyramids of 
Egypt are poetical because of the 'association with boundless deserts,' 
and that a ' pyramid, of the same dimensions ' would not be sablime in 
Lincoln's Inn Fields : not so poetical, certainly ; but take away the ' pyra- 
mids,' and what is the ' desert' ? Take away Stonehenge from Salisbury 
Plain, and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath, or any other unen- 
closed down. 

" There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect," he continues, " than 
the city of Venice. Does this depend upon the sea or the canal ? — 

' The dirt and seaweed whence proud Venice rose.' 

Is it the canal which runs between the palace and the prison, or the Bridge 
of Sighs, which connects them, that renders it poetical ? There would be 
nothing to make the canal of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington, 
were it not for its artificial adjuncts." 

But why should Nature and Art be made divisible by these controver- 
sialists ? in poetry they are not so : — Oure (pvats iKuvi] yiucrai rexviis &rep, 
oi»Te irav r^xvr] fj.h (pvaiv KSKTr^fievr} — Without Art Nature can never he per- 
fect, and without JS^ature Art can claim no being. In a poet no kind of 
knowledge is to be overlooked ; to a poet nothing can be useless.] 

I 



114 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [pabtiii,! 

tinct and agreeable than his lines on the Man of Ross, when '^ 
he asks, — 

" Whose causeAvay parts the vale with shady rows? 

Whose seats the weary traveller repose ? 

Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise ? 

The Man of Eoss, each lispiug babe replies. 

Behold the market-place with poor o'erspread — 

The Man of Ross divides the weekly bread : 

He feeds yon almshouse, neat, but void of state, 

Where Age and Want sit smiling at the gate : 

Him portion'd maids, apprenticed orphans bless'd, 

The young who labour, and the old who rest," 

Nor is he without observations of animal nature, in which 

every epithet is a decisive touch, as — 

" From the green myriads in the peopled grass, 
What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme. 
The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam ; 
Of smell, the headlong lioness between 
And hound sagacious, on the tainted green ; 
Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood, 
To that which warbles through the vernal wood ; ■ 

The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine. 
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line." 

His picture of the dying- pheasant is in every one's memory,* . 
and possibly the lines of his ' AYinter Piece ' may by this time | 
[1819] have crossed the recollection of some of our brave ad- 
venturers in the polar enterprise. 

** So Zembla's rocks, the beauteous work of frost, 
Rise white in air, and glitter o'er the coast ; 
Pale suns, unfelt at distance, roll away, 
And on the impassive ice the lightnings play ; 
Eternal snows the growing mass supply. 
Till the bright mountains prop th' incumbent sky ; 
As Atlas fix'd each hoary pile appears, 
The gather'd winter of a thousand years." 

I am well aware that neither these nor similar instances will 

* [*• Ah ! what avail his glossy varying dyes. 
His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes. 
The vivid green his shining plumes unfold, 
His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold ?" 

Windsor Forest. 

This is like Whitbread's phoenix, which Sheridan averred that he had 
described " like a poulterer ; it was green and yellow, and red and blue : he 
did not let us oif for a single feather." — Bi/rons Works, vol. vi. p, 372. 

When Pope epithetises the Kennet, the Loddon, the Mole, and the Wey. 
he is very happy ; and he is equally so when he poetises the fish.] 



;j PART III.] EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 1 1 5 

j come up to Mr. Bowles's idea of that talent for the picturesque 
j which he deems essential to poetry.* " The true poet," says 

: * [It is remarkable that, excepting the ' Nocturnal Reverie of Lady Win- 

1 Chelsea,' and a passage or two in the ' Windsor Forest ' of Pope, the poetry 

I of the period between the publication of ' Paradise Lost ' and ' The Seasons ' 

' does not contain a single new image of external nature, and scarcely pre- 

j sents a familiar one from which it can be inferred that the eye of the poet 

I had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had 

j urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination. To what a 

j low state knowledge of the most obvious and important phenomena had 

1 sunk, is evident from the style in which Dryden has executed a description 

! of Night in one of his tragedies, and Pope his translation of the celebrated 

i moonlight scene in the * Iliad.' A blind man, in the habit of attending 

{ accurately to descriptions casually dropped from the lips of those around 

j him, might easily depict these appearances with more truth. Dryden's lines 

are vague, bombastic, and senseless ; those of Pope, though he had Homer 

to guide him, are throughout false and contradictory. The verses of Dryden, 

once highly celebrated, are forgotten ; those of Pope still retain " their hold 

upon public estimation ;" nay, there is not a passage of descriptive poetry 

which at this day finds so many and such ardent admirers. — Wordsworth, 

Supp. to the Pref. 

Here is the passage in Dryden to which Mr. Wordsworth alludes : — 

" All things are hush'd as Nature's self lay dead ; 
The mountains seem to nod their drowsy head ; 
The little birds in dreams their songs repeat, 
And sleeping flowers beneath the night-dew sweat : 
Even lust and envy sleep ; yet love denies 
Rest to my soul, and slumber to my eyes." 

The Indian Emperor. 

And here the moonlight scene in Homer as rendered by Pope and by 
Cowper : — 

" As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night ! 
O'er heaven's clear azure spreads her sacred light, 
When not a breath disturbs the deep serene, 
And not a cloud o"ercasts the solemn scene ; 
Around her throne the vivid planets roll. 
And stars unnumber'd gild the glowing pole, 
O'er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed 
And tip with silver every mountain's head ; 
Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise, 
A flood of glory bursts from all tlie skies ; 
The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight. 
Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light." — Pope. 

" As when around the clear bright moon, the stars 
Shine in full splendour, and the winds are hush'd. 
The groves, the mountain-tops, the headland heights 
Stand all apparent, not a vapour streaks 
The boundless blue, but ether, open'd wide, 
All glitters, and the shepherd's heart is cheer'd." — Cowper. 
The scraps of external nature in Lee, Otway, and Garth are no whit 
better than Dryden's. Swift gave some true touches of artificial nature in 

i2 



116 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETKY. [partih.' 

that writer, " should have an eye attentive to and familiar with 
every change of season, every variation of light and shade of 
nature, every rock, every tree, and every leaf in her secret places. 
He who has not an eye to observe these, and who cannot w^ith a 
glance distinguish every hue in her variety, must be so far de- 
ficient in one of the essential qualities of a poet." Every rock, 
every leaf, every diversity of hue in nature's variety ! Assuredly 
this botanising perspicacity might be essential to a Dutch flower- 
painter ; but Sophocles displays no such skill, and yet he is a ^ 
genuine, a great, and aifecting poet. Even in describing the 
desert island of Philoctetes, there is no minute observation of , 
nature's hues in secret places. Throughout the Greek tragedians c 
there is nothing to show them more attentive observers of inani- 
mate objects than other men. Pope's discrimination lay in the r 
lights and shades of human manners, which are at least as in- - 
teresting as those of rocks and leaves. In moral eloquence he , 
is for ever densus et instans sibi. The mind of a poet employed ^ 
in concentrating such lines as these descriptive of creative power, 
which 

*' Builds life on earth, on change duration founds, 
And bids th' eternal -wheels to know their rounds/' 

might well be excused for not descending to the minutely pictu- 
resque. The vindictive personality of his satire is a fault of the : 
man, and not of the poet. But his wit is not all his charm. He i 
glows with passion in the Epistle of Eloisa, and displays a lofty ; 
feeling, much above that of the satirist and the man of the world, 
in his Prologue to ' Cato,' and his * Epistle to Lord Oxford.'* [] 

his ' City Shower ' and ' Morning in Town,' but it was left to Thomson and I 
Dyer to recall us to country life. 

Mr. Southey has given no bad. comment on the passage from Pope quoted , 
above: — " Here," says Southey, " are the planets rolling round the moon; 
here is the pole gilt and glowing with stars ; here are trees made yellow, „ 
and mountains tipped with silver by the moonlight ; and here is the whole , 
sky in a flood of glory — appearances not to be found either in Homer or in ^ 
nature : finally, these gilt and glowing skies, at the very time when they 
are thus pouring forth a flood of glory, are represented, as a blue vault ! 
The astronomy in these lines would not appear more extraordinary to Dr. . 
Herschel than the imagery to every person who has observed a moonlight j 
scene." — Quar. Bev., vol. xii. p. 87.] i 

* [Mr. Campbell might have added his noble conclusion to ' The Dun- -. 
ciad,' which is written in the highest vein of poetry, and exhibits a genius - 
that wanted direction, opportunity, or inclination, rather than cultivation or 
increase of strength.] 



PART III.] EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 117 

I know not how to designate the possessor of such gifts but by 
I the name of a genuine poet — * 



qualem vix repperit unum 



Millibus in multis hominum consul tus Apollo." 

Ausonius. 

Of the poets in succession to Pope I have spoken in their 
i respective biographies. 

j * [Mr. Bowles's position is this : that Pope saw rural or field nature through 

': what Dryden expressively calls the spectacles of books — that he did not see 

J it for himself, as Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Milton saw it, 

i| as it was seen by Thomson and Cowper — that his country nature is by reflec- 

i tion, cold, unwarming, and dead-coloured — that he did not make what 

ij Addison calls additions to nature, as every great poet has done — that Dr. 

,' Blacklock's descriptive nature is as good, who was blind from his birth — 

■ that ^oc^s that gi-aze the tender gi-een, in Pope, graze audibly in true descrip- 

■ live writers — and that his Paradise had been a succession of alleys, platforms, 
. and quincunxes — a Hagley or a Stowe, not an Eden, as Milton has made it. 

All this is true enough, but its importance has been overrated. Pope is 
still a great poet, though he did not dwell long in the mazes of fancy, but 
stooped, as he expresses it, to truth, and moralised his song — that he made 
sense, or wit, or intellectuality, hold the place of mere description, and gave 
us peopled pictures rather than landscapes with people. Mr. Campbell has 
! properly extended the offices of poetry, and written a defence of Pope, which 
will exist as long as * Eloisa's Letter,' or any poem of its great writer. 

Gray, whose scattered touches of external nature are exquisitely true, has 
laid it down as a rule that description, the most graceful ornament of poetry, 
as he calls it, should never form the bulk or subject of a poem ; Pope — who 
was not very happy in his strokes from landscape nature — that where it 
forms the body of a poem it is as absurd as a feast made up of sauces ; while 
Swift, who knew nothing of trees and streams, and lawns and meads, ob- 
jected to Thomson's philosophical poem that it was all description and 
nothing was doing, whereas Milton engaged men in actions of the highest 
importance. 

Thomson was not insensible of this, and to diversify and animate his 
poem had recourse to episodes of human interest. The first ' Shipwreck * 
was devoid of story, it was all description ; as Falconer left it, there is an 
action to heighten and relieve the nature, making description the secondary 
object of the poem. 

" As a poet," says Mr. Bowles, " I sought not to depreciate, but discrimi- 
nate, and assign to him his proper rank and station in his art among English 
poets ; — below Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton, in the highest order of ima- 
gination or impassioned poetry ; but above Diyden, Lucretius, and Horace, 
in moral and satirical : inferior to Dryden in lyric sublimity ; equal to him 
in painting characters from real life (such as are so powerfully delineated in 
' Absalom and Achitophel ') ; but superior to him in passion — for what ever 
equalled, or ever will approach, in its kind, the Epistle of Eloisa to Abe- 
lard? In consequence of the exquisite pathos of this epistle, I have 
assigned Pope a poetical rank far above Ovid. I have placed him above 
Horace, in consequence of the perfect finish of his satires and moral poems ; 
but in descriptive poetry, such as ' Windsor Forest,' beneath Cowper or 
Thomson:'— Final Appeal, 1825, p. 55.] 



118 SCOTTISH POETEY. 



SCOTTISH POETEY. 



The origin of the Lowland Scottish language has been a fruitful ; 
subject of controversy. Like the English it is of Gothic ma- 
terials, and, at a certain distance of time from the Norman 
Conquest, is found to contain, as well as its sister dialect of the t 
south, a considerable mixture of French. According to one 
theory, those Gothic elements of Scotch existed in the Lowlands 
anterior to the Anglo-Saxon settlements in England, among ^ 
the Picts, a Scandinavian race: the subsequent mixture of. 
French words arose from the French connexions of Scotland, 
and the settlement of Normans among her people ; and thus 
by the Pictish and Saxon dialects meeting, and an infusion of 
French being afterwards superadded, the Scottish language 
arose, independent of modern English, though necessarily simi- 
lar, from the similarity of its materials. According to another 
theory the Picts were not Goths, but Cambro-British, a Celtic 
race, like the Western Scots who subdued and blended with the 
Picts under Kenneth MacAlpine. Of the same Celtic race , 
were also the Britons of Strathclyde, and the ancient people of 
Galloway. In Galloway, though the Saxons overran that pe- ^ 
ninsula, they are affirmed to have left but little of their blood 
and little of their language. In the ninth century Galloway 
was new peopled by the Irish Cruithne, and at the end of the , 
eleventh century was universally inhabited by a Gaelic people. 
At this latter period tlie common language of all Scotland, with , 
the exception of Lothian and a corner of Caithness, was the - 
Gaelic, and in the twelfth century commenced the progress of 
the English language into Scotland Proper ;* so that Scotch is 
only migrated English. 

* Lothian, now containing the Scottish metropolis, was, after several 
fluctuations of possession, annexed to the territory of Scotland in 1020 ; but 
even in the time of David I. is spoken of as not a part of Scotland. David 
.addresses his " faithful subjects of all Scotland and of Lothian.'' 



SCOTTISH POETRY. 119 



In support of the opposite system, an assertor better known 
than trusted, namely Pinkerton, has maintained that " there is 
not a shadow of proof that the Gaelic language was ever at all 
spoken in the Lowlands of Scotland." Yet the author of * Cale- 
donia' has given not mere shadows of proof, but veiy strong 
grounds for concluding that, in the first place, to the north of 
the Forth and Clyde, with the exception of Scandinavian settle- 
ments admitted to have been made in Orkney, Caithness, a strip of 
Sutherland, and partially in the Hebrides, a Gothic dialect was 
unknown in ancient Scotland. Amidst the arguments to this 
effect deduced from the topography of (the supposed Gothic) 
Pictland, in which Mr. Chalmers affirms that not a Saxon name 
is to be found older than the twelfth century — and amidst the 
evidences accumlated from the laws, religion, antiquities, and 
manners of North Britain — one recorded fact appears sufficiently 
striking. When the assembled clergy of Scotland met Malcolm 
Caenmore and Queen Margaret, the Saxon princess was unable 
to understand their language. Her husband, who had learnt 
English, was obliged to be their interpreter. All the clergy 
of Pictland we are told were at that time Irish ; but, among a 
people with a Gaelic king and a Gaelic clergy, is it conceivable 
that the Gaelic language should not have been commonly 
spoken ? 

With regard to Galloway, or South- Western Scotland, the 
paucity of Saxon names in that peninsula (keeping apart pure 
or modern English ones) is pronounced by Mr, G. Chalmers 
to show the establishments of the Saxons to have been few and 
temporary, and their language to have been thinly scattered in 
comparison with the Celtic. As we turn to the south-east of 
Scotland, it is inferred from topography that the Saxons of 
Lothian never permanently settled to the westward of the Avon ; 
while the numerous Celtic names which reach as far as the 
Tweed evince that the Gaelic language not only prevailed in 
proper Scotland, but overflowed her boundaries, and, like her 
arms, made inroads on the Saxon soil. 

Mr. Ellis in discussing this subject seems to have been startled 
by the difficulty of supposing the language of England to have 
superseded the native Gaelic in Scotland, solely in consequence 
of Saxon migrations to the north in the reign of Malcolm Caen- 



120 SCOTTISH POETRY. 



more. Malcolm undoubtedly married a Saxon priucess, who , 
brought to Scotland her relations and domestics. Many Saxons J 
also fled into Scotland from the violences of the Norman Con- 
quest. Malcolm gave them an asylum, and during his incursions 
into Cumberland and Northumberland carried off so many young 
captives that English persons were to be seen in every house and 
village of his dominions in the reign of David I. But on the 
death of Malcolm the Saxon followers both of Edgar Atheling : 
and Margaret were driven away by the enmity of the Gaelic 
people. Those expelled Saxons must have been the gentry, i 
while the captives, since they were seen in a subsequent age, •: 
must have been retained as being servile or vileyns. The fact ; 
of the expulsion of Margaret and Edgar Atheling's followers is i 
recorded in the ' Saxon Chronicle.' It speaks pretty clearly for i 
the general Gaelicism of the Scotch at that period ; and it also i 
prepares us for what is afterwards so fully illustrated by the 
author of ' Caledonia/ viz. that it was the new dynasty of Scot- s 
tish kings after Malcolm Caenmore that gave a more diffusive ■■ 
course to the peopling of proper Scotland by Saxon, by Anglo- 
Norman, and by Flemish colonists. In the successive charters 
of Edgar, Alexander, and David I., we scarcely see any other 
witnesses than Saxons, who enjoyed under those monarchs all 
power, and acquired vast possessions in every district of Scot- 
land, settling with their followers in entire hamlets. 

If this English origin of Scotch be correct, it sufficiently 
accounts for the Scottish poets in the fifteenth century speaking 
of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate as their masters and models 
of style, and extolling them as the improvers of a language to 
which they prefix the word " our," as if it belonged in common 
to Scots and English, and even sometimes denominating their 
own language English. 

Yet in whatever lisrht we are to reg-ard Lowland Scotch, 
whether merely as northern English, or as having a mingled 
Gothic origin from the Pictish and Anglo-Saxon, its claims to 
poetical antiquity are respectable. The extreme antiquity of the 
Elegy on Alexander III., on which Mr. Ellis rests so much im- 
portance, is indeed disputed ; but ' Sir Tristrem ' exhibits an ori- 
ginal romance, composed on the north of the Tweed, at a time 
when there is no proof that southern English contained any 



SCOTTISH POETRY. 121 



I work of that species of fiction that was not translated from the 

j French. In the fourteenth century Barbour celebrated the 

.'greatest royal hero of his country (Bruce) in a versified romance 

ithat is not uninteresting. The next age is prolific in the names 

;! of distinguished Scottish ^^ ma/iers." Henry the Minstrel, said 

!jto have been blind from his birth, rehearsed the exploits of 

nVallace in strains of fierce though vulgar fire. James I. of 

j Scotland ; Henrysone, the author of ' Eobene and Makyne,' the 

1 first known pastoral, and one of the best in a dialect rich with 

; the favours of the pastoral Muse ; Douglas, the translator of 

I Yirgil ; Dunbar, 'Mersar, and others, gave a poetical lustre to 

I Scotland in the fifteenth century, and fill up a space in the 

annals of British poetry, after the date of Chaucer and Lyd- 

gate, that is otherwise nearly barren. James I. had an elegant 

and tender vein, and the ludicrous pieces ascribed to him possess 

considerable comic humour. Douglases descriptions of natural 

scenery are extolled by T. Warton, who has given ample and 

interpreted specimens of them in his * History of English Poetry.' 

He was certainly a fond painter of nature, but his imagery 

is redundant and tediously profuse. His chief original work is 

the elaborate and quaint allegory of ' King Hart.'* It is full of 

alliteration, a trick which the Scottish poets might have learnt 

to avoid from the '* rose of rhetours" (as they call him) Chaucer, 

but in which they rival the anapaestics of Langlande. 

Dunbar is a poet of a higher order. His tale of ' The Friars 
of Berwick ' is quite in the spirit of Chaucer. His ' Dance of 
the Seven Deadly Sins through Hell,' though it would be absurd 
to compare it with the beauty and refinement of the celebrated 
' Ode on the Passions,' has yet an animated picturesqueness not 
unlike that of Collins. The eflPect of both pieces shows how 
much more potent allegorical figures become by being made to 
pass suddenly before the imagination, than by being detained 
in its view by prolonged description. Dunbar conjures up the 
personified Sins as Collins does the Passions, to rise, to strike, 
and disappear. They '* come like shadows, so depart." 

* In \phich the human heart is personified as a sovereign in his castle, 
guarded by the five Senses, made captive by Dame Pleasaunce, a neigh- 
bouring potentate, but finally brought back from thraldom by Age and 
Experience. 



122 SCOTTISH POETRY. 

In the works of those northern makers of the fifteenth cen- 
tury there is a gay spirit, and an indication of jovial manners 
which forms a contrast to the covenanting national character oi 
subsequent times. The frequent coarseness of this poetical 
gaiety it would indeed be more easy than agreeable to prove by 
quotations ; and if we could forget how very gross the humoui 
of Chaucer sometimes is, we might, on a general comparison oi 
the Scotch with the English poets, extol the comparative deli- 
cacy of English taste ; for Skelton himself, though more bur- 
lesque than Sir David Lyndsay in style, is less outrageously in- 
decorous in matter. At a period when James IV. was breaking 
lances in the lists of chivalry, and when the court and court poets, 
of Scotland might be supposed to have possessed ideas of decency/ 
if not of refinement, Dunbar at that period addresses the Queen,' 
on the occasion of having danced in her Majesty's chamber, with 
jokes which a beggar- wench of the present day would probably 
consider as an offence to her delicacy. 

Sir David Lyndsay was a courtier, a foreign ambassador, and 
the intimate companion of a prince, for he attended James V. 
from the first to the last day of that monarch's life. From his 
rank in society we might suppose that he had purposely laid., 
aside the style of a gentleman, and clothed the satirical morali- i 
ties which he levelled against Popery in language suited to the 
taste of the vulgar, if it were easy to conceive the taste of the 
vulgar to have been at that period grosser than that of their su- j 
periors. Yet while Lyndsay's satire, in tearing up the depravi-i 
ties of a corrupted church, seems to be polluted with the scandal'^ 
on which it preys, it is impossible to peruse his writings without' 
confessing the importance of his character to the country in 
which he lived, and to the cause which he was born to serve. 
In his tale of ' Squyre Meldrum ' we lose sight of the reformer. , 
It is a little romance, very amusing as a draught of Scottish chi- ' 
valrous manners, apparently drawn from the life, and blending a , 
sportive and familiar with an heroic and amatory interest. Nor 
is its broad careless diction perhaps an unfavourable relief to the ; 
romantic spirit of the adventures which it portrays. 



LIVES OF THE POETS : CHAUCER. 123 



LIVES OF THE POETS, 



CHAUCER. 

[Born, 1328. Died, October 25th, 1400.] 

1 Geoffrey Chaucer, according to his own account, was born 
in London, and the year 1328 is generally assigned as the date 
of his birth. The name is Norman, and, according to Francis 
Thynne, the antiquarian, is one of those, on the roll of Battle 
Abbey, which came in with William the Conqueror.* It is 
uncertain at which of the universities he studied. Warton and 
others, who allege that it was at Oxford, adduce no proof of their 
assertion ; and the signature of " Philogenet of Cambridge," which 
the poet himself assumes in one of his early pieces, as it was 
fictitious in the name, miglit be equally so in the place ; although 
it leaves it rather to be conjectured that the latter university had 
the honour of his education. 

The precise time at which he first attracted the notice of his 

♦ Vide Thynne's animadversions on Speght's edition of Chaucer, in 
the Rev. J. H, Todd's ' Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer,' p. 18. Thynne 
calls in question Speght's supposition of Chaucer being the son of a vintner, 
which Mr. Godwin, in his ' Life of Chaucer," has adopted. Respecting the 
arms of the poet, Thynne (who was a herald) further remarks to Speght, 
" You set down that some heralds are of opinion that he did not descend 
from any great house, whiche they gather by his armes : it is a slender con- 
jecture ; for as honourable bowses and of as great antiquytye have borne as 
mean armes as Chaucer, and yet Chaucer's armes are not so mean eyther for 
colour, chardge, or particion, as some will make them.'" If, indeed, the fact 
of Chaucer's residence in the Temple could be proved, instead of resting on 
mere rumour, it would be tolerable evidence of his high birth and fortune ; 
for only young men of that description were anciently admitted to the inns 
of court. But, unfortunately for the claims of the Inner Temple to the 
honour of Chaucer s residence, Mr. Thynne declares " it most certaine to be 
gathered by cyrcumstances of recordes, that the lawyers were not of the 
Temple till the latter parte of the reygne of Edw. III., at which tyme 
Chaucer was a grave manne, holden in greate credyt, and employed in em- 
-e." 



124 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

munificent patrons, Edward III. and John of Gaunt, cannot be 
ascertained ; but if his poem, entitled * The Dreme,' be rightly- 
supposed to be an epithalamium on the nuptials of the latter 
prince with Blanche heiress of Lancaster, he must have enjoyed 
the court patronage in his thirty-first year. The same poem ^ 
contains an allusion to the poet's own attachment to a lady at 
court, whom he afterwards married. She was maid of honour to 
Philippa, queen of Edward III., and a younger sister of Catherine 
Swinford,* who was first the mistress, and ultimately the wife, of 
John of Gaunt. 

By this connexion Chaucer acquired the powerful support of 
the Lancastrian family ; and during his life his fortune fluctuated 
with theirs. Tradition has assigned to him a lodge, near the 
royal abode of Woodstock, by the park gate, where it is probable 
that he composed some of his early w^orks ; and there are passages 
in these which strikingly coincide with the scenery of his sup- 
posed habitation. There is also reason to presume that he 
accompanied his warlike monarch to France in the year 1359; 
and from the record of his evidence in a military court, which 
has been lately discovered, we find that he gave testimony to a 
fact which he witnessed in that kingdom in the capacity of a 
soldier.f But the expedition of that year, which ended in the 
peace of Bretigne, gave little opportunity of seeing military 
service ; and he certainly never resumed the profession of arms. 

In the year 1367 he received from Edward III. a pension of 
twenty marks per annum, a sum which in those times might 
probably be equivalent to two or three hundred pounds at the 
present day. In the patent for this annuity he is styled by the 

* Catherine was the widow of Sir John Swinford, and daughter of Payne 
de Eouet, king-at-arms to the province of Guienue. It appears from other 
evidence, however, that Chaucer's wife's name was Philippa Pykard. Mr. 
Tyrwhitt explains the circumstance of the sisters having different names, 
by supposing that the father and his eldest daughter Catherine might bear 
the name of De Rouet, from some estate in their possession ; while the family 
name, Pykard, was retained by the younger daughter Philippa, who was 
Chaucer's wife. 

t [Chaucer was made prisoner at the siege of Betters, in France, in 1359, 
as appears from his depositions in the famous controversy between Lord 
Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor upon the right to bear the shield ''azure a 
bend or," which had been assumed by Grosvenor, and which, after a long 
suit, he was obliged to discontinue. The roll of the depositions is in the 
Tower, and was printed in 1832 by Sir N. Harris Nicolas (2 vols, folio).] 



CHAUCER. 125 



i king valeitus nosier. Tlie name valettus was given to young 
j men of the highest quality before they were knighted, though 
' not as a badge of service. Chaucer, however, at the date of this 
I pension, was not a young man, being then in his thirty-ninth year. 
j He did not acquire the title of scutifer, or esquire, till five years 
, after, when he was appointed joint envoy to Genoa with Sir 
j James Pronan and Sir John de Mari. It has been conjectured 
I that, after finishing the business of this mission, he paid a reve- 
! rential visit to Petrarch, who was that year at Padua.* The 
I fact, however, of an interview, so pleasing to the imagination, 
I rests upon no certain evidence ; nor are there even satisfactory 
I proofs that he ever went on his Italian embassy. 

His genius and connexions seem to have kept him in prosperity 
during the whole of Edward III.'s reign, and during the period 
of John of Gaunt's influence in the succeeding one. From Edward 
he had a grant of a pitcher of wine a-day in 1374, and was made 
comptroller of the small customs of wool and of the small cus- 
toms of wine in the port of London. In the next year the king 
granted him the wardship of Sir Simon Staplegate's heir, for 
which he received 104Z. The following year he received some 
forfeited wool to the value of 71/. 4*. 6c?., sums probably equal 

* Mr. Tyrwhitt is upon the whole inclined to doubt of this poetical 
meeting ; and De Sade, who, in his ' Me'moires pour la Vie de Petrarque,' 
conceived he should be able to prove that it took place, did not live to fulfil 
his promise. The circumstance which, taken collaterally with the fact of 
Chaucer's appointment to go to Italy, has been considered as giving the 
strongest probability to the English poet's having visited Petrarch, is that 
Chaucer makes one of the pilgrims in the ' Canterbury Tales' declare that 
he learned his story from the worthy clerk of Padua. The story is that of 
' Patient Grisilde ;' which, in fact, originally belonged to Boccaccio, and was 
only translated into Latin by Petrarch. It is not easy to explain, as Mr. 
Tyrwhitt remarks, why Chaucer should have proclained his obligation to 
Petrarch, while he really owed it to Boccaccio. According to Mr. Godwin, 
it was to have an occasion of boasting of his friendship with the Italian 
laureat. But why does he not boast of it in his own person ? He makes the 
clerk of Oxford declare that he had his story from the clerk of Padua ; but 
he does not say that he had it himself from that quarter. Mr. Godwin, 
however, believes that he shadows forth himself under the character of the 
lean scholar. This is surely improbable, when the poet in another place 
describes himself as round and jolly, while the poor Oxford scholar is lank 
and meagre. If Chaucer really was corpulent, it was indeed giving but a 
shadow of himself to paint his figure as very lean : but why should he give 
himself a double existence, and describe both the jolly substance and the 
meagre shadow ? 



126 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

in effective value to twenty times their modern denomination. 
In the last year of Edward he was appointed joint envoy to 
France with Sir Guichard Dangle and Sir Richard Stan, or 
Sturrey, to treat of a marriage between Richard Prince of Wales 
and tlie daughter of the French king. His circumstances during 
this middle part of his life must have been honourable and opu- 
lent ; and they enabled him, as he tells us in his * Testament of 
Love,' to maintain a plentiful hospitality ; but the picture of his 
fortunes was sadly reversed by the decline of John of Gaunt's 
influence at the court of Richard II., but more immediately by 
the poet's connexion with an obnoxious political party in the city. 
This party, whose resistance to an arbitrary court was dignified 
with the name of a rebellion, was headed by John of Northampton, 
or Comberton, who in religious tenets was connected with the 
followers of Wickliife, and in political interests with the Duke of 
Lancaster ; a connexion which accounts for Chaucer having been 
implicated in the business. His pension, it is true, was renewed 
under Richard ; and an additional allowance of twenty marks 
per annum was made to him in lieu of his daily pitcher of wine. 
He was also continued in his office of comptroller, and allowed 
to execute it by deputy, at a time when there is every reason to 
believe that he must have been in exile. It is certain, however, 
that he was compelled to fly from the kingdom on account of his 
political connexions ; and retired first to Hainault, then to France, 
and finally to Zealand. He returned to England, but was arrested 
and committed to prison. The coincidence of the time of his 
severest usage with that of the Duke of Gloucester's power has 
led to a fair supposition that that usurper was personally a greater 
enemy to the poet than King Richard himself, whose disposition 
towards him might have been softened by the good offices of 
Anne of Bohemia, a princess never mentioned by Chaucer but 
in terms of the warmest panegyric. 

While he was abroad his circumstances had been impoverished 
by his liberality to some of his fellow-fugitives ; and his effects 
at home had been cruelly embezzled by those intrusted with their 
management, who endeavoured, as he tells us, to make him perish 
for absolute want. 

In 1388, while yet a prisoner, he was obliged to dispose of his 
two pensions, which were all the resources now left to him by his 



CHAUCER. 127 



bersecutors. As the price of his release from imprisonment, he 
Iwas obliged to make a confession respecting the late conspiracy. 
|It is not known what he revealed ; certainly nothing to the pre- 
Ijudice of John of Gaunt, since that prince continued to be his 
feiend. 

To his acknowledged partisans, who had betrayed and tried to 
ijstarve him during his banishment, he owed no fidelity. It is true 
that extorted evidence is one of the last ransoms which a noble 
mind would wish to pay for liberty ; but before we blame Chaucer 
Jfor making any confession, we should consider how fair and easy 
|the lessons of uncapitulating fortitude may appear on the outside 
of a prison, and yet how hard it may be to read them by the light 
of a dungeon. As far as dates can be guessed at in so obscure a 
transaction, his liberation took place after Richard had shaken off 
the domineering party of Gloucester, and had begun to act for 
himself. Chaucer's political errors — and he considered his share 
in the late conspiracy as errors of judgment, though not of inten- 
tion — had been committed while Richard was a minor, and the 
acknowledgment of them might seem less humiliating when made 
to the monarch himself, than to an usurping faction ruling in his 
name. He was charged too, by his loyalty, to make certain dis- 
closures important to the peace of the kingdom ; and his duty as 
a subject, independent of personal considerations, might well be 
put in competition with ties to associates already broken by their 
treachery.* 

While in prison he began a prose work entitled ' The Testa- 
ment of Love,' in order to beguile the tedium of a confinement 
which made every hour, he says, appear to him a hundred winters ; 
and he seems to have published it to allay the obloquy attendant 
on his misfortunes, as an explanation of his past conduct. It is 
an allegory, in imitation of Boethius's ' Consolations of Philo- 
sophy ;' an universal favourite in the early literature of Europe. 
Never was an obscure affair conveyed in a more obscure apology ; 
yet, amidst the gloom of allegory and lamentation, the vanity of 
the poet sufficiently breaks out. It is the goddess of Love who 
visits him in his confinement, and accosts him as her own immortal 

* " For my trothe and my conscience," he says in his ' Testament of 
Love,' " bene -witnesse to me bothe, that this knowing sothe have I saide for 
troathe of my leigiaunce, by which I was charged on my kinges behalfe." 



128 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

bard. He descants to her on his own misfortunes, on the polities 
of London, and on his devotion to the Lady Marguerite, or Pearl, 
whom he found in a mussel-shell, and who turns out at last to 
mean the spiritual comfort of the church.* 

In 1389 the Duke of Lancaster returned from Spain, and he 
had once more a steady protector. In that year he was appointed 
clerk of the works at Westminster, and in the following year 
clerk of those at Windsor, with a salary of 36/. per annum. His 
resignation of those offices, which it does not appear he held for 
more than twenty months, brings us to the sixty-fourth year of: 
his age, when he retired to the country, most probably to Wood- ; 
stock, and there composed his immortal ' Canterburj'^ Tales,' 
amidst the scenes which had inspired his youthful genius. 

In 1394 a pension of 20/. a-year was granted to him ; and in:] 
the last year of Richard's reign he had a grant of a yearly tuni 
of wine, — we may suppose in lieu of the daily pitcher, which had 
been stopped during his misfortunes. 

Tradition assigns to our poet a residence in his old age at 
Donnington Castle, near Newbury, in Berkshire; to which he 
must have moved in 1397, if he ever possessed that mansion:, 
but Mr. Grose, who affirms that he purchased Donnington Castle 
in that year, has neglected to show the documents of such a pur- 
chase. One of the most curious particulars in the latter part of 
his life is the patent of protection granted to Chaucer in the year 
1398, which his former inaccurate biographers had placed in the] 
second year of Richard, till Mr. Tyrwhitt corrected the mistaken 
date. The deed has been generally supposed to refer to the poet's ; 
creditors ; as it purports, however, to protect him contra cemulos 
suos, the expression has led Mr. Godwin to question its having, 
any relation to his debtors and creditors. It is true that rivals 
or competitors are not the most obvious designation for the 
creditors of a great poet ; but still, as the law delights in fictions, ' 
and as the writ for securing a debtor exhibits at this day such 
figurative personages as John Doe and Richard Roe, the form of 
protection might in those times have been equally metaphorical : 

* Mr. Todd has given, in his ' Illustrations,' some poems supposed to be 
written by Chaucer during his imprisonment ; in which, in the same alle- 
gorical manner, under the praises of Spring, he appears to implore the 
assistance of Vere, Earl of Oxford, the principal favourite of Richard II. 



CHAUCER. 129 



inor, as a legal metonymy, are the terms rival and competitor by 

I i any means inexpressive of that interesting relation which subsists 

n between the dun and the fugitive — a relation which in all ages 

I has excited the warmest emulation, and the promptest ingenuity 

J of the human mind. Within a year and a half from the date of 

■I this protection, Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt, ascended 

i the throne of England by the title of Henry IV. 

I It is creditable to the memory of that prince that, however 

*i basely he abandoned so many of his father's friends, he did not 

ij suffer the poetical ornament of the age to be depressed by the 

li revolution. Chaucer's annuity and pipe of wine were continued 

jj under the new reign, and an additional pension of forty marks 

I a-year was conferred upon him. But the poet did not long enjoy 

1 this accession to his fortune. He died in London, on the 25th 

of October, 1400, and was interred in the south cross aisle of 

Westminster Abbey. The monument to his memory was erected 

a century and a half after his decease, by a warm admirer of his 

genius, Nicholas Brigham, a gentleman of Oxford. It stands at 

j the north end of a recess formed by four obtuse foliated arches, 

I and is a plain altar with three quatrefoils and the same number 

; of shields. Chaucer, in his ' Treatise of the Astrolabe,' mentions 

his son Lewis, for whom it was composed in 1391, and who was 

at that time ten years of age. Whether Sir Thomas Chaucer, 

who was Speaker of the House of Commons in the reign of 

Henry IV., was another and elder son of the poet, as many of 

his biographers have supposed, is a point which has not been 

distinctly ascertained. 

Mr. Tyrwhitt has successfully vindicated Chaucer from the 
charge brought against him by Verstegan and Skinner, of having 
adulterated English by vast importations of French words and 
phrases. If Chaucer had indeed naturalised a multitude of French 
words by his authority, he might be regarded as a bold innovator, 
yet the lang'ua^e would have still been indebted to him for enrieh- 
ing it. But such revolutions in languages are not wrought by 
individuals ; and the style of Chaucer will bear a fair comparison 
with that of his contemporaries, Gower, Wickliffe, and Mande- 
ville. That the polite English of that period should have been 
highly impregnated with French is little to be wondered at, 
considering that English was a new language at court, where 

K 



130 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

French had of late been exclusively used, and must have still u 
been habitual.* English must, indeed, have been known at 
court when Chaucer began his poetical career, for he would not 
have addressed his patrons in a language entirely plebeian ; but 
that it had not been long esteemed of sufficient dignity for a 
courtly muse appears from Gower's continuing to write French 
verses, till the example of his great contemporary taught him to . 
polish his native tongue.f ij 

The same intelligent writer, Mr. Tyrwhitt, while he vindicates i| 
Chaucer from the imputation of leaving English more full of 
French than he found it, considers it impossible to ascertain, „. 
with any degree of certainty, the exact changes which he pro- 
duced upon the national style, as we have neither a regular series 
of authors preceding him, nor authentic copies of their works, 
nor assurance that they were held as standards by their contem- 
poraries. In spite of this difficulty, Mr. Ellis ventures to consider 
Chaucer as distinguished from his predecessors by his fondness 
for an Italian inflexion of words, and by his imitating the charac-:, 
teristics of the poetry of that nation. 

He has a double claim to rank as the founder of English tj 
poetry, from having been the first to make it the vehicle of spi- 1 
rited representations of life and native manners, and from ha^dng' 
been the first great architect of our versification, in giving our 
language the ten syllable or heroic measure, which, though it 
may sometimes be found among the lines of more ancient versifiers, 
evidently comes in only by accident. This measure occurs in the 

* [Dryden has accused Chaucer of introducing Gallicisms into the Eng- 
lish language ; not aware that French was the language of the court of 
England long before Chaucer's time, and that, far from introducing 
French phrases into the English tongue, the ancient bard was successfully 
active in introducing the English as a fashionable dialect, instead of the 
French, which had, before his time, been the only language of polite litera- 
ture in England. — Sir Walter Scotfs Misc. Prose Works, vol. i. p. 426.] 

t Mr. Todd, in his ' Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer," p. 26, observes, 
that authors, both historical and poetical, in the century after the decease of 
these poets, in usually coupling their names, place Gower before Chaucer 
merely as a tribute to his seniority. But though Gower might be an older 
man than Chaucer, and possibly earlier known as a writer, yet, unless it can 
be proved that he published English poetry before his ' Confessio Amantis,' 
of which there appears to be no evidence, Chaucer must still claim prece- 
dency as the earlier English poet. The ' Confessio Amantis ' was published 
in the sixteenth year of Richard II.'s reign, at which time Chaucer had 
written all his poems, except ' The Canterbury Tales.' 



CHAUCER. 131 



earliest poem that is attributed to him,* ' The Court of Love,' 
a title borrowed from the fantastic institutions of that name, 
where points of casuistry in the tender passion were debated and 
decided by persons of both sexes. It is a dream, in which the 
poet fancies himself taken to the Temple of Love, introduced to 
a mistress, and sworn to observe the statutes of the amatory god. 
As the earliest work of Chaucer, it interestingly exhibits the 
successful effort of his youthful hand in erecting a new and 
stately fabric of English numbers. As a piece of fancy, it is 
grotesque and meagre; but the lines often flow with great 
harmony. 

His story of ' Troilus and Cresseide ' was the delight of Sir 
Philip Sydney ; and perhaps, excepting the ' Canterbury Tales,' 
was, down to the time of Queen Elizabeth, the most popular poem 
in the English language. It is a story of vast length and almost 
desolate simplicity, and abounds in all those glorious anachronisms 
which were then, and so long after, permitted to romantic poetry ; 
such as making the son of King Priam read the ^ Thebais ' of 
Statins, and the gentlemen of Troy converse about the devil, 
jousts and tournaments, bishops, parliaments, and scholastic 
divinity. 

The languor of the story is, however, relieved by many touches 
of pathetic beauty. The confession of Cresseide in the scene of 
felicity, when the poet compares her to the " new abashed night- 
ingale, that stinteth first ere she beginneth sing," is a fine passage, 
deservedly noticed by Warton. The grief of Troilus after the 
departure of Cresseide is strongly portrayed in Troilus's soliloquy 
in his bed : — 

" Where is mine owne ladle, lief, and dere ? 
Where is her white brest — where is it — where ? 
Where been her armes, and her iyen clere, 
That yesterday this time with me were ? 
Now may I wepe alone with many a teare, 
And graspe about I may ; but in this place, 
Save a pillowe, I find nought to embrace." 

The sensations of Troilus, on coming to the house of his faith- 
less Cresseide, when, instead of finding her returned, he beholds 
the barred doors and shut windows, giving tokens of her absence, 

* Written, as some lines in the piece import, at the age of nineteen. 

k2 



132 LIVES OF THE POETS. ] 

as well as his precipitate departure from the distracting scene, are 
equally well described : — 

" Therwith whan he "was ware, and gan behold 
How shet * was every window of the place, 
As frost him thought his herte gan to cold, 
For which, with changed deedly pale face, 
Withouten worde, he for by gan to pace, 
And, as God would, he gan so faste ride. 
That no man his continuance espied. 
Than said he thus : O paleis desolate, 
O house of houses, whilom best yhight, 
O paleis empty and disconsolate, 
O thou lanterne of which queint f is the light, 
O paleis whilom day, that now art night ; 
Wei oughtest thou to fall, and I to die, 
Sens X she is went, that wont was us to gie !" § 

The two best of Chaucer's allegories, ' The Flower and the 
Leaf,' and * The House of Fame,' have been fortunately perpe- 
tuated in our language — the former by Dryden, the latter by Pope. 
' The Flower and the Leaf is an exquisite piece of fairy fancy. 
With a moral that is just sufficient to apologise for a dream, and 
yet which sits so lightly on the story as not to abridge its most 
visionary parts, there is in the whole scenery and objects of the 
poem an air of wonder and sweetness, an easy and surprising^ 
transition, that is truly magical. Pope had not so enchanting a 
subject in ' The House of Fame ;' yet, with deference to Warton, 
that critic has done Pope injustice in assimilating his imitations 
of Chaucer to the modern ornaments in Westminster Abbey, 
which impair the solemn effect of the ancient building. The 
many absurd and fantastic particulars in Chaucer's ' House oi^ J 
Fame ' will not suffer us to compare it, as a structure in poetry, | 
with so noble a pile as Westminster Abbey in architecture. 
Much of Chaucer's fantastic matter has been judiciously omitted 
by Pope, who at the same time has clothed the best ideas of the 
old poem in spirited numbers and expression. Chaucer supposes 
himself to be snatched up to heaven by a large eagle, who ad- 
dresses him in the name of St. James and the Virgin Mary, and, 
in order to quiet the poet's fears of being carried up to Jupiter, 
like another Ganymede, or turned into a star, like Orion, tells 
him that Jove wishes him to sing of other subjects than love and 
" blind Cupido," and has therefore ordered that Dan Chaucer 

* Shut. t Extinguished. % Since. ^ To make joyous. 



CHAUCER. 133 



\ should be brought to behold the House of Fame. In Pope, the 
! philosophy of fame comes with much more propriety from the 
i poet himself than from the beak of a talkative eagle. 
; It was not until his green old age that Chaucer put forth, in 
I the ' Canterbury Tales,' the full variety of his genius, and the 
pathos and romance, as well as the playfulness, of fiction. In the 
serious part of those tales he is, in general, more deeply indebted 
1 to preceding materials than in the comic stories, which he raised 
j upon slight hints to the air and spirit of originals. The design 
I of the whole work is after Boccaccio's ' Decamerone,' but exceed- 
I ingly improved. The Italian novelist's ladies and gentlemen, 
I who have retired from the city of Florence on account of the 
' plague, and who agree to pass their time in telling stories, have 
! neither interest nor variety in their individual characters ; the 
time assigned to their congress is arbitrary, and it evidently 
breaks up because the author's stores are exhausted. Chaucer's 
design, on the other hand, though it is left unfinished, has definite 
boundaries and incidents to keep alive our curiosity, independent 
of the tales themselves. At the same time, while the action of 
the poem is an event too simple to divert the attention altogether 
from the pilgrims' stories, the pilgrimage itself is an occasion 
sufficiently important to draw together almost all the varieties of 
existing society, from the knight to the artisan, who, agreeably 
to the old simple manners, assemble in the same room of the 
hostellerie. The enumeration of those characters in the Pro- 
logue forms a scene, full, without confusion ; and the object of 
their journey gives a fortuitous air to the grouping of indi- 
viduals who collectively represent the age and state of society in 
which they live. It may be added, that, if any age or state of 
society be more favourable than another to the uses of the poet, 
that in which Chaucer lived must have been peculiarly pic- 
turesque ; an age in which the differences of rank and profession 
were so strongly distinguished, and in which the broken masses 
of society gave out their deepest shadows and strongest colouring 
by the morning light of civilization. An unobtrusive but suf- 
ficient contrast is supported between the characters, as between 
the demure Prioress and the genial Wife of Bath, the rude and 
boisterous Miller and the polished Knight, &c. &c. Although 
the object of the journey is religious, it casts no gloom over the 



134 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

meeting ; and we know that our Catholic ancestors are justly re- 
presented in a state of high good-humour on the road to such 
solemnities. 

The sociality of the pilgrims is, on the whole, agreeably sus- 
tained ; but in a journey of thirty persons, it would not have 
been adhering to probability to have made the harmony quite 
uninterrupted. Accordingly, the bad humour which breaks out 
between the lean Friar and the cherub-faced Sompnour, while it 
accords with the hostility known to have subsisted between those 
two professions, gives a diverting zest to the satirical stories 
which the hypocrite and the libertine level at each other. 

Chaucer's forte is description ; much of his moral reflection is 
superfluous — none of his characteristic painting. His men and 
women are not mere ladies and gentlemen, like those who furnish 
apologies for Boccaccio's stories. They rise before us minutely 
traced, profusely varied, and strongly discriminated. Their 
features and casual manners seem to have an amusing: congruitv 
with their moral characters. He notices minute circumstances 
as if by chance ; but every touch has its effect to our conception 
so distinctly, that we seem to live and travel with his personage^ 
throughout the journey. 

What an intimate scene of English life in the fourteenth cen- 
tury do we enjoy in those tales, beyond what history displays by 
glimpses through the stormy atmosphere of her scenes, or the 
antiquary can discover by the cold light of his researches ! Our 
ancestors are restored to us, not as phantoms from the field of 
battle or the scaffold, but in the full enjoyment of their social 
existence. After four hundred years have closed over the mirth- 
ful features which formed the living originals of the poet's de- 
scriptions, his pages impress the fancy with the momentary cre- 
dence that they are still alive ; as if Time had rebuilt his ruins, 
and were reacting the lost scenes of existence. 



GOWER. 135 



JOHN GOWER. 

[Born about 1325. Died about 1409.] 

Little is known of Gower's personal history. "The proud 
tradition in the Marquis of Stafford's family," says Mr. Todd,* 
" has been, and still is, that he was of Stitenham ; and who would 
not consider the dignity of his genealogy augmented by enrolling 
among its worthies the moral Gower ?" 

His effigies in the church of St. Mary Overies is often inac- 
curately described as having a garland of ivy and roses on the 
head. It is, in fact, a chaplet of roses, such as, Thynne says, 
was anciently worn by knights ; a circumstance which is favour- 
able to the suspicion that has been suggested, of his having been 
of the rank of knighthood. If Thynne's assertion, respecting the 
time of the lawyers first entering the Temple, be correct, it will 
be difficult to reconcile it with the tradition of Gower's having 
been a student there in his youth. 

By Chaucer's manner of addressing Gower, the latter appears 
to have been the elder. He was attached to Thomas of Wood- 
stock, as Chaucer was to John of Gaunt. The two poets appear 
to have been at one time cordial friends, but ultimately to have 
quarrelled. Gower tells us himself that he was blind in his old 
age. From his will it appears that he was living in 1408. His 
bequests to several churches and hospitals, and his legacy to his 
wife of 100/., of all his valuable goods, and of the rents arising 
from his manors of Southwell in the county of Nottingham, and 
of Multon in the county of Suffolk, undeniably prove that he 
was rich. 

One of his three great works, the ' Speculum Meditantis,' a 
poem in French, is erroneously described by Mr. Godwin and 
others as treating of conjugal fidelity. In an account of its con- 
tents in a MS. in Trinity College, Cambridge, we are told that 
its principal subject is the repentance of a sinner. The ' Vox 
Clamantis,' in Latin, relates to the insurrection of the commons 
in the reign of Richard 11. The ' Confessio Amantis,' in Eng- 

* In ' Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer,' by the Rev. H. J. Todd. 



136 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

lish, is a dialogue between a lover and his confessor, who is ^ 
priest of Venus, and who explains, by apposite stories and philo^ 
sopbical illustrations, all the evil affections of the heart \vhic4 
impede or counteract the progress and success of the tender 
passion. 

His writings exhibit all the crude erudition and science of his 
age ; a knowledge sufficient to have been the fuel of genius if 
Gower had possessed its fire. 



JOHN LYDGATE 

[Bom, 1379. Died, 1461.] 

Was born at a place of that name in Suffolk, about the year 
1379. His translation (taken through the medium of Laurence's 
version) of Boccaccio's ' Fall of Princes ' was begun while 
Henry VI. was in France, where that king never w£is but when 
he went to be crowned at Paris, in 1432. Lydgate was then 
above threescore. He was a monk of the Benedictine order at 
St. Edmund's Bury, and in 1423 was elected prior of Hatfield 
Brodhook, but the following year had licence to return to his 
convent again. His condition, one would imagine, should have 
supplied him with the necessaries of life, yet he more than once 
complains to his patron, Humphry, Duke of Gloucester, of his 
•wants ; and he shows distinctly in one passage that he did not 
dislike a little more wine than his convent allowed him. He was 
full thirty years of age when Chaucer died, whom he calls his 
master, and who probably was so in a literal sense. His ' Fall 
of Princes ' is rather a paraphrase than a translation of his 
original. He disclaims the idea of writing " a stile briefe and 
compendious." A great story he compares to a great oak, which 
is not to be attacked with a single stroke, but by '*' a long 
processed' 

Gray has pointed out beauties in this writer which had eluded 
the research or the taste of former critics. " I pretend not," 
says Gray, " to set him on a level with Chaucer, but he cer- 
tainly comes the nearest to him of any contemporar)' writer I am 
acquainted with. His choice of expression and the smoothness 



LYDGATE-JAMES I. OF SCOTLAND. 137 

6' of his verse far surpass both Gower and Occleve. He wanted 
■<! not art in raising the more tender emotions of the mind." Of 
i; these he gives several examples. The finest of these, perhaps, is 
:|a passage descriptive of maternal agony and tenderness.* 



JAMES I. OF SCOTLAND. 

[Bora, 1394. Died, Feb. 1436-7.] 

I James I. of Scotland was born in the year 1394, and became 
! heir apparent to the Scottish crown by the death of his brother, 
j prince David. Taken prisoner at sea by the English at ten 
years of age, he received some compensation for his cruel deten- 
tion by an excellent education. It appears that he accompanied 
Henry V. into France, and there distinguished himself by his 
skill and bravery. On his return to his native country he endea- 
voured during too short a reign to strengthen the rights of the 
I crown and people against a tyrannical aristocracy. He was the 
' first who convoked commissioners from the shires in place of the 
numerous lesser barons, and he endeavoured to create a house of 
commons in Scotland by separating the representatives of the 
people from the peers ; but his nobility foresaw the effects of his 
scheme, and too successfully resisted it. After clearing the low- 
lands of Scotland from feudal oppression, he visited the high- 
lands, and crushed several refractory chieftains. Some instances 
of his justice are recorded which rather resemble the cruelty of 
the times in which he lived than his own personal character ; but 
in such times Justice herself wears a horrible aspect. One Mac- 
donald, a petty chieftain of the north, displeased with a widow 
on his estate for threatening to appeal to the king, had ordered 
her feet to be shod with iron plates nailed to the soleSj and then 
insultingly told her that she was thus armed against the rough 
roads. The widow, however, found means to send her story to 
James, who seized the savage, with twelve of his associates, 
whom he shod with iron in a similar manner, and, having exposed 

* [Canace, condemned to death by her father JEolus, sends to her guilty 
brother Macareus the last testimony of her unhappy passion. — Book i. 
folio 39.] 



138 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

them for several days in Edinburgh, gave them over to the exe- 
cutioner. 

While a prisoner in Windsor Castle James had seen and ad^^ 
mired the beautiful Lady Jane Beaufort, daughter of the Duke^ 
of Somerset. Few royal attachments have been so romantic and 
so happy. His poem entitled ' The Quair,'* in which he pathe-*^ 
tically laments his captivity, was devoted to the celebration of' 
this lady, whom he obtained at last in marriage, together with^ 
his liberty, as Henry conceived that his union with the graud-^ 
daughter of the Duke of Lancaster might bind the Scottish- 
monarch to the interests of England. 

James perished by assassination in the 42nd year of his age, 
leaving behind him the example of a patriot king, and of a man 
of genius universally accomplished. 



ROBERT HENRYSONE. 

[Born, 1425. Died, 1495.] 

Nothing is known of the life of Henrysone but that he was a 
schoolmaster at Dunfermline. Lord Hailes supposes his office' 
to have been preceptor of youth in the Benedictine convent of 
that place. Besides a continuation of Chaucer's ' Troilus and 
Cresseide,' he wrote a number of fables, of which MS- copies are 
preserved in the Scotch Advocates' Library. 



WILLIAM DUNBAR. 

[Born, 1460? Died, 1520?] 

The little that is known of Dunbar has been gleaned from the 
complaints in his own poetry, and from the abuse of his contem- 
porary Kennedy, which is chiefly directed against his poverty. ^ 
From the colophon of one of his poems, dated at Oxford, it has ' 
been suggested, as a conjecture, that he studied at that university.! 

* Quair is the old Scotch word for a book. 

t [Dunbar in 1477 was entered among the Determinantes, or Bachelors 
of Arts, at Salvator's College, St. Andrew's, and in 1479 he took his degree 
there of Master of Arts. (See Laing's * Dunbar,' vol. i. p. 9.) That he 
studied at Oxford at any time is highly improbable.] 



HENRYSONE— DUNBAR- LYNDSAY. 139 

By liis own account, he travelled through France and England 
as a novice of the Franciscan order ; and, in that capacity, con- 
fesses that he was guilty of sins, probably professional frauds, 
from the stain of which the holy water could not cleanse hira. 
On his return to Scotland he commemorated the nuptials of 
James IV. with Margaret Tudor, in his poem of ^ The Thistle and 
Rose ;' but we find that James turned a deaf ear to his remon- 
strances for a benefice, and that the queen exerted her influence 
in his behalf ineffectually.* Yet, from the verses on his dancing 
ij in the queen's chamber, it appears that he was received at court 
i on familiar terms. 



SIR DAVID LYNDSAY. 

[Born, 1490? Died, 1557.] 

David Lyndsay, according to the conjecture of his latest 
editor,! was born in 1490. He was educated at St. Andrew's, 
! and, leaving that university, probably about the age of nineteen, 
i became the page and companion of James V. during the prince's 
childhood, not his tutor, as has been sometimes inaccurately stated. 
When the young king burst from the faction which had oppressed 
himself and his people, Lyndsay published his * Dream,' a poem 
on the miseries which Scotland had suffered during the minority. 
In 1530 the king appointed him Lyon King at Arms, and a 
grant of knighthood, as usual, accompanied the office. In that 
capacity he went several times abroad, and was one of those who 
were sent to demand a princess of the Imperial line for the Scot- 
tish sovereign. James having, however, changed his mind to a 
connexion with France, and having at length fixed his choice on 
the Princess Magdalene, Lyndsay was sent to attend upon her 
to Scotland ; but her death, happening six weeks after her 
arrival, occasioned another poem from our author, entitled ' The 
Deploracion.' On the arrival of Mary of Guise, to supply her 

* [In 1 500 he received a yearly pension of ten pounds from King James, 
" to be pait to him for al the dais of his life, or quhil he be promovit be our 
Souerane Lord to a benefice of xl li. or aboue," The pension was raised to 
XX li. in 1507, and to Ixxx li. in 1510, the latter to be paid till such time as 
he should receive a benefice of one hundred pounds or upwards.] 

f Mr. G. Chalmers. 



140 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

place, he superintended the ceremony of her triumphant entry 
into Edinburgh ; and, blending the fancy of a poet with the god- 
liness of a reformer, he so constructed the pageant, that a lady 
like an angel, who came out of an artificial cloud, exhorted her 
Majesty to serve God, obey her husband, and keep her body 
pure, according to God's commandments. 

On the 14th of December, 1542, Lyndsay witnessed the de- 
cease of James V., at his palace of Falkland, after a connexion 
between them which had subsisted since the earliest days of the 
prince. If the death of James (as some of his biographers have 
asserted) occasioned our poet's banishment from court, it is cer- 
tain that his retirement was not of long continuance ; since he 
was sent, in 1543, by the Regent of Scotland, as Lyon King, to 
the Emperor of Germany. Before this period the principles of 
the reformed religion had begun to take a general root in the 
minds of his countrymen ; and Lyndsay, who had already written 
a drama in the style of the old moralities, with a view to ridi- 
cule the corruptions of the Popish clergy, returned from the Con- 
tinent to devote his pen and his personal influence to the cause 
of the new faith. In the parliaments which met at Edinburgh 
and Linlithgow, in 1544, 45, and 46, he represented the county 
of Cupar in Fife; and in 1547 he is recorded among the cham- 
pions of the Reformation who counselled the ordination of John 
Knox. 

The death of Cardinal Beaton drew from him a poem on the 
subject, entitled ' A Tragedy,' (the term tragedy was not then 
confined to the drama,) in which he has been charged with draw- 
ins- together all the worst thino^s that could be said of the mur- 
dered prelate. It is incumbent, however, on those who blame 
him for so doing, to prove that those worst things were not 
atrocious. Beaton's principal failing was a disposition to burn 
with fire those who opposed his ambition, or who differed from 
his creed ; and if Lyndsay was malignant in exposing one tyrant, 
what a libeller must Tacitus be accounted ! 

His last embassy was to Denmark, in order to negotiate for a 
free trade with Scotland, and to solicit ships to protect the Scot- 
tish coasts against the English. It was not till after returning 
from this business that he published * Squyre Meldrum,' the last 
and the liveliest of his works. 



SIR THOMAS WYAT. 141 

SIR THOMAS WYAT, 

[Born, 1503. Died, Oct. J 542.] 

Called the Elder, to distinguish him from his son, who suffered 
in the reign of Queen Mary, was born at Allington Castle, in Kent, 
in 1503, and was educated at Cambridge. He married early in 
life, and was still earlier distinguished at the court of Henry VIII., 
with whom his interest and favour were so great as to be pro- 
verbial. His person was majestic and beautiful, his visage (ac- 
cording to Surrey's interesting description) was " stern and mild :" 
he sang and played the lute with remarkable sweetness, spoke 
foreign languages with grace and fluency, and possessed an inex- 
haustible fund of wit. At the death of Wolsey he could not be 
more than 19 ; yet he is said to have contributed to that minis- 
ter's downfall by a humorous story, and to have promoted the 
Reformation by a seasonable jest. At the coronation of Anne 
Boleyn he officiated for his father as ewerer, and possibly wit- 
nessed the ceremony not with the most festive emotions, as there 
is reason to suspect that he was secretly attached to the royal 
bride. When the tragic end of that princess was approaching, 
one of the calumnies circulated against her was, that Sir Thomas 
"Wyat had confessed having had an illicit intimacy with her. The 
scandal was certainly false ; but that it arose from a tender par- 
tiality really believed to exist between them, seems to be no 
overstrained conjecture. His poetical mistress's name is Anna ; 
and in one of his sonnets he complains of being obliged to desist 
from the pursuit of a beloved object on account of its being the 
king's. The perusal of his poetry was one of the unfortunate 
queen's last consolations in prison. A tradition of Wyat's at- 
tachment to her was long preserved in his family. She retained 
his sister to the last about her person ; and, as she was about to 
lay her head on the block, gave her weeping attendant a small 
prayer-book, as a token of remembrance, with a smile of which 
the sweetness was not effaced by the horrors of approaching 
death. Wyat's favour at court, however, continued undiminished ; 
and notwithstanding a quarrel with the Duke of Suffolk, which 



142 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

occasioned his being committed to the Tower, he was, imme- 
diatety on his liberation, appointed to a command under the 
Duke of Norfolk, in the army that was to act against the rebels. ^ 
He was also knighted, and, in the following year, made high 
sheriff of Kent. 

When the Emperor Charles Y., after the death of Anne \ 
Boleyn, apparently forgetting the disgrace of his aunt in the ^ 
sacrifice of her successor, showed a more conciliatory disposition i 
towards England, Wyat w^as, in 1537, selected to go as ambas- ll 
sador to the Spanish court. His situation there was rendered 
exceedingly difficult, by the mutual insincerity of the negotiating i 
powers, and by his religion, which exposed him to prejudice, and i 
even at one time to danger from the Inquisition. He had to i 
invest Henry's bullying remonstrances with the graces of mode- t 
rate diplomacy, and to keep terms with a bigoted court while he I 
questioned the Pope's supremacy. In spite of those obstacles, } 
the dignity and discernment of Wyat gave him such weight in « 
negotiation, that he succeeded in expelling from Spain his mas- ^1 
ter's most dreaded enemy. Cardinal Pole, who was so ill received ? 
at Madrid that the haughty legate quitted it with indignation. < 
The records of his different embassies exhibit not only personal ( 
activity in following the Emperor Charles to his most important i 
interviews with Francis, but sagacity in foreseeing consequences ^ 
and in giving advice to his own sovereign. Neither the dark 
policy nor the immoveable countenance of Charles eluded his s 
penetration. When the Emperor, on the death of Lady Jane * 
Seymour, offered the King of England the Duchess of Milan in j: 
marriage, Henry's avidity caught at the offer of her duchy, and j 
Heynes and Bonner were sent out to Spain as special commis-' \ 
sioners on the business ; but it fell off, as Wyat had predicted, 
from the Spanish monarch's insincerity. 

Bonner, who had done no good to the English mission, and ^ 
who had felt himself lowered at the Spanish court by the superior 
ascendancy of Wyat, on his return home sought to indemnify 
himself for the mortification by calumniating hds late colleague. 
In order to answer those calumnies, Wyat was obliged to obtain I 
his recall from Spain ; and Bonner's charges, on being investi- 
gated, fell to the ground. But the Emperor's journey through 
France having raised another crisis of expectation, Wyat wa.s 



SIR THOMAS WYAT. 143 

sent out once more to watch the motions of Charles, and to 
fathom his designs. At Blois he had an interview with Francis, 
and another with the Emperor, whose friendship for the King of 
France he pronounced, from all that he observed, to be insincere. 
" He is constrained," said the English ambassador, " to come to a 
show of friendship, meaning to make him a mockery when he 
has done." When events are made familiar to us by history, we 
are perhaps disposed to undervalue the wisdom that foretold 
them ; but this much is clear, that, if Charles's rival had been as 
wise as Sir Thomas Wyat, the Emperor would not have made a 
mockery of Francis. Wyat's advice to his own sovereign at this 
period was to support the Duke of Cleves, and to ingratiate him- 
self with the German Protestant princes. His zeal was praised ; 
but the advice, though sanctioned by Cromwell, was not followed 
by Henry. Warned probably, at last, of the approaching down- 
fall of Cromwell, he obtained his final recall from Spain. On his 
return, Bonner had sufficient interest to get him committed to 
the Tower, where he was harshly treated and unfairly tried, but 
was nevertheless most honourably acquitted ; and Henry, satis- 
fied of his innocence, made him considerable donations of land. 
Leland informs us that about this time he had the command of 
a ship of war. The sea service was not then, as it is now, a 
distinct profession. 

Much of his time, however, after his return to England, must 
be supposed, from his writings, to have been spent at his paternal 
seat of Allington, in study and rural amusements. From that 
pleasant retreat he was summoned, in the autumn of 1542, by 
order of the king, to meet the Spanish ambassador, who had 
landed at Falmouth, and to conduct him from thence to London. 
In his zeal to perform this duty he accidentally overheated him- 
self with riding, and was seized, at Sherborne, with a malignant 
fever, which carried him off, after a few days' illness, in his 
thirty-ninth year. 



144 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY. 

[Bora, 1516. Died, 1547.] 

Walpole, Ellis, and Warton gravely inform us that Lord 
Surrey contributed to the victory of Flodden, a victory which 
was gained before Lord Surrey was born. The mistakes of such 
writers may teach charity to criticism. Dr. Nott, who has cleared 
away much fable and anachronism from the noble poet's bio- 
graphy, supposes that he was born in or about the year 1516, 
and that he was educated at Cambridge, of which university he 
was afterwards elected high steward. At the early age of six- 
teen he was contracted in marriage to the Lady Frances Vere, 
daughter to John Earl of Oxford. The Duke of Richmond was 
afterwards affianced to Surrey's sister. It was customary, in 
those times, to delay, frequently for years, the consummations of 
such juvenile matches ; and the writer of Lord Surrey's ' Life,' 
already mentioned, gives reasons for supposing that the poet's 
residence at Windsor, and his intimate friendship with Richmond, 
so tenderly recorded in his verses, took place, not in their abso- 
lute childhood, as has been generally imagined, but immediately 
after their being contracted to their respective brides. If this 
was the case, the poet's allusion to 

" The secret groves which oft we made resound 
Of pleasant plaint, and of our ladies' praise," 

may be charitably understood as only recording the aspirations 
of their conjugal impatience. 

Surrey's marriage was consummated in 1535. In the subse- 
quent year he sat with his father, as Earl Marshal, on the trial 
of his kinswoman Anne Boleyn. Of the impression which that 
event made upon his mind there is no trace to be found either 
in his poetry or in tradition. His grief for the amiable Rich- 
mond, whom he lost sOon after, is more satisfactorily testified. 
It is about this period that the fiction of Nash, unfaithfully mis- 
applied as reality by Anthony Wood,* and from him copied, by 

* Nash's ' History of Jack Wilton.' 



HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY. 145 

mistake, by Walpole and Warton, sends the poet on his romantic 
tour to Italy, as the knight errant of the fair Geraldine. There 
is no proof, liowever, that Surrey was ever in Italy. At the 
period of his imagined errantry his repeated appearance at the 
court of England can be ascertained ; and Geraldine, if she was 
a daughter of the Earl of Kildare, was then only a child of seven 
years old.* 

That Surrey entertained romantic sentiments for the fair Ge- 
raldine seems, however, to admit of little doubt; and that, too, 
at a period of her youth which makes his homage rather sur- 
prising. The fashion of the age sanctioned such courtships, 
under the liberal interpretation of their being platonic. Both 
Sir Philip Sydney and the Chevalier Bayard avowed attachments 
of this exalted nature to married ladies, whose reputations were 
never sullied, even when the mistress wept openly at parting 
from her admirer. Of the nature of Surrey's attachment we 
may conjecture what we please, but can have no certain test even 
in his verses, which might convey either much more or much 
less than he felt ; and how shall we search in the graves of men 
for the shades and limits of passions that elude our living ob- 
servation ? 

Towards the close of 1540 Surrey embarked in public busi- 
ness. A rupture with France being anticipated, he was sent 
over to that kingdom, with Lord Russell and the Earl of South- 
ampton, to see that everything was in a proper state of defence 
within the English pale. He had previously been knighted ; 
and had jousted in honour of Anne of Cleves, upon her mar- 
riage with Henry. The commission did not detain him long in 
France. He returned to England before Christmas, having 
acquitted himself entirely to the king's satisfaction. In the next 

* If concurring proofs did not so strongly point out his poetical mistress 
Geraldine to be the daughter of the Earl of Kildare, we might well suspect, 
from the date of Surrey's attachment, that the object of his praises must 
have been some other person^ Geraldine, M'hen he declared his devotion to 
her, was only thirteen years of age. She was taken, in her childhood, under 
the protection of the court, and attended the Princess Mary. At the age of 
fifteen she married Sir Anthony Wood, a man of sixty, and after his death 
accepted the Earl of Lincoln. From Surrey's verses we find that she slighted 
his addresses, after having for some time encouraged them ; and from his 
conduct it appears that he hurried into war and public business in order to 
forget her indifference. 



146 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

— t ■ — — 

year, 1541, we may suppose him to have been occupied in his 
literary pursuits — perhaps in his translation of Yirgil. England 
was then at peace both at home and abroad, and in no other 
subsequent year of Surrey's life could his active service have 
allowed him leisure. In 1542 he received the order of the 
Garter, and followed his father in the expedition of that year 
into Scotland, where he acquired his first military experience. 
Amidst these early distinctions, it is somewhat mortifying to find 
him, about this period, twice committed to the Fleet prison ; on 
one occasion on account of a private quarrel, on another for 
eating meat in Lent, and for breaking the windows of the citizens 
of London with stones from his cross-bow. This was a strange 
misdemeanour indeed for a hero and a man of letters. His 
apology, perhaps, as curious as the fact itself, turns the action 
only into quixotic absurdity. His motive, he said, was reli- 
gious. He saw the citizens sunk in papal corruption of 
manners, and he wished to break in upon their guilty secrecy 
by a sudden chastisement that should remind them of Divine 
retribution ! 

The war with France called him into more honourable ac- 
tivity. In the first campaign he joined the army under Sir John 
Wallop, at the siege of Landrecy : and in the second and larger 
expedition he went as marshal of the army of which his father 
commanded the vanguard. The siege of Montreuil was allotted 
to the Duke of Norfolk and his gallant son ; but their operations 
were impeded by the want of money, ammunition, and artillery 
— 'Supplies most probably detained from reaching them by the 
influence of the Earl of Hertford, who had long regarded both 
Surrey and his father with a jealous eye. In these disastrous 
circumstances, Surrey seconded the duke's eflforts with zeal and 
ability. On one expedition he was out two days and two nights, 
spread destruction among the resources of the enemy, and re- 
turned to the camp with a load of supplies, and without the loss 
of a single man. In a bold attempt to storm the town, he suc- 
ceeded so far as to make a lodgment in one of the gates ; but 
was dangerously w^ounded, and owed his life to the devoted 
bravery of his attendant Clere, who received a hurt in rescuing 
him, of which he died a month after. On the report of the 
Dauphin of France's approach with 60,000 men, the English 



HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY. 147 

■ ' ' ' — ' ' ■ ^F— 

made an able retreat, of which Surrey conducted the movements 
as marshal of the camp. 

He returned with his father to England, but must have made 
only a short stay at home, as we find him soon after fighting a 
spirited action in the neighbourhood of Boulogne, in which he 
chased back the French as far as Montreuil. The following year 
he commanded the vanguard of the army of Boulogne, and finally 
solicited and obtained the government of that place. It was 
then nearly defenceless ; the breaches nnrepaired, the fortifica- 
tions in decay, and the enemy, with superior numbers, established 
so near as to be able to command the harbour, and to fire upon 
the lower town. Under such disadvantages Surrey entered on 
his command, and drew up and sent home a plan of alterations 
in the works, which was approved of by the king, and ordered 
to be acted upon. Nor were his eflTorts merely defensive. On 
one occasion he led his men into the enemy's country as far as 
Samer-au-Bois, which he destroyed, and returned in safety with 
considerable booty. Afterwards, hearing that the French in- 
tended to revictual their camp at Outreau, he compelled them 
to abandon their object, pursued them as far as Hardilot, and 
was only prevented from gaining a complete victory through 
the want of cavalry. But his plan for the defence of Boulogne, 
which, by his own extant memorial, is said to evince great military 
skill, was marred by the issue of one unfortunate sally. In order 
to prevent the French from revictualling a fortress that menaced 
the safety of Boulogne, he found it necessary, with his slender 
forces, to risk another attack at St. Etienne. His cavalry first 
charged and routed those of the French : the foot, which he 
commanded in person, next advanced, and the first line, con- 
sisting chiefly of gentlemen armed with corselets, behaved gal- 
lantly ; but the second line, in coming to the push of the pike, 
were seized with a sudden panic, and fled back to Boulogne, in 
spite of all the efforts of their commander to rally them. Within 
a few months after this affair he was recalled to England, and 
Hertford went out to France as the king's lieutenant-general. 

It does not appear, however, that the loss of this action was 
the pretext for his recall, or the direct cause of the king's ven- 
geance, by which he was subsequently destined to fall. If the 
faction of Hertford, that was intriguing against him at home, 

l2 



148 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

ever succeeded in fretting the king's humour against him, by 
turning his misfortune into a topic of blame, Henry's irritation 
must have passed away, as we find Surrey recalled, with promises 
of being replaced in his command (a promise, however, which 
was basely falsified), and again appearing at court in an honour- 
able station. But the event of his recall (though it does not 
seem to have been marked by tokens of royal displeasure) cer- 
tainly contributed indirectly to his ruin, by goading his proud 
temper to further hostilities with Hertford, Surrey, on his re- 
turn to England, spoke of his enemy with indignation and 
menaces, and imprudently expressed his hopes of being revenged 
in a succeeding reign. His words were reported, probably with 
exaggeration, to the king, and occasioned his being sent for some 
time as a prisoner to Windsor. He was liberated, however, from 
thence, and again made his appearance at court, unsuspicious of 
his impending ruin. 

It is difficult to trace any personal motives that could impel 
Henry to wish for his destruction. He could not be jealous of 
his intentions to marry the Princess Mary — that fable is dis- 
proved by the discovery of Surrey's widow having survived him. 
Nor is it likely that the king dreaded him as an enemy to the 
Reformation, as there is every reason to believe that he was a 
Protestant. The natural cruelty of Henry seems to have been 
but an instrument in the designing hands of Hertford, whose 
ambition, fear, .'and jealousy prompted him to seek the destruc- 
tion of Norfolk and his son. His measures were unhappily aided 
by the vindictive resentment of the Duchess of Norfolk against 
her husband, from whom she had been long separated, and by 
the still more unaccountable and unnatural hatred of the Duchess 
of Richmond against her own brother. Surrey was arrested on 
the 12th of December, 1546, and committed to the Tower. 
The depositions of witnesses 'against him, whose collective 
testimony did not substantiate even a legal offence, w^ere trans- 
mitted to the king's judges at Norwich, and a verdict was re- 
turned, in consequence of which he was indicted for high treason. 
We are not told the full particulars of his defence, but are only 
generally informed that it was acute and spirited. With respect 
to the main accusation, of his bearing the arms of the Confessor, 
he proved that he had the authority of the heralds in so doing, 



LORD VAUX.— EICHARD EDWARDS. 149 

and that he had worn them himself in the king's presence, as 
his ancestors had worn them in the presence of former kings. 
Notwithstanding his manifest innocence, the jury was base 
enough to find him guilty : the chancellor pronounced sentence 
of death upon him ; and in the flower of his age, in his 31st 
year, this noble soldier and accomplished poet was beheaded on 
Tower-hill. 



LORD VAUX. 

[Died, 1560?] 

It is now universally admitted that Lord Vaux, the poet, was 
not Nicholas, the first peer, but Thomas, the second baron of 
that name. He was one of those who attended Cardinal Wolsey 
on his embassy to Francis I. He received the order of 
the Bath at the coronation of Anne Boleyn, and was for some 
time Captain of the island of Jersey. A considerable number of 
his pieces are found in ' The Paradise of Dainty Devices.' Mr. 
Park * has noticed a passage in the prose prologue to Sackville's 
Induction to * The Mirror for Magistrates,' that Lord Vaux 
had undertaken to complete the history of King Edward's two 
sons who were murdered in the Tower, but that it does not ap- 
pear he ever executed his intention. 



RICHARD EDWARDS 

[Born, 1523. Died, 1566.] 

Was a principal contributor to ' The Paradise of Dainty Devices,' 
and one of our earliest dramatic authors. He wrote two come- 
dies, one entitled ' Damon and Pythias,' the other ' Palamon 
and Arcite,' both of which were acted before Queen Elizabeth. 
Besides his regular dramas, he appears to have contrived masques, 
and to have written verses for pageants; and is described as 
having been the first fiddle, the most fashionable sonnetteer, and 
the most facetious mimic of the court. In the beginning of 

* In his edition of Walpole's < Royal and Noble Authors.' 



150 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

Elizabeth's reign he was one of the gentlemen of her chapel, 
and master of the children there, having the character of an 
excellent musician. 



WILLIAM HUNNIS 

Was a gentleman of Edward VI.'s Chapel, and afterwards 
master of the boys of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel. He translated 
the Psalms, and was author of * A Hive of Honey,' ^ A Handful 
of Honeysuckle,' and other godly works. He died in 1568.* 



THOMAS SACKVILLE, 

BARON BUCKHURST, AND EARL OF DORSET, 

[Born, 1536. Died, April 19, 1608.] 

Was the son of Sir Richard Sackville, and was born at Withyam, 
in Sussex, in 1536. He was educated at both universities, and 
enjoyed an early reputation in Latin as well as in English poetry. 
While a student of the Inner Temple he wrote his tragedy of 
' Gorboduc,' which was played by the young students, as a part 
of a Christmas entertainment, and afterwards before Queen 
Elizabeth at Whitehall, in 1561. In a subsequent edition of 
this piece it was entitled ' The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex.' 
He is said to have been , assisted in the composition of it by 
Thomas Norton, but to what extent does not appear. T. War- 
ton disputes the fact of his being at all indebted to Norton. 
The merit of the piece does not render the question of much 
importance. This tragedy, and his contribution of the Induction 
and Legend of the Duke of Buckingham to ' The INIirror for 
Magistrates,' f compose the poetical history of Sackville's life. 

* [Hunnis was also a writer of interludes. — See Collier's Annals of the 
Stage, vol. i. p. 235.] 

f ' The Mirror for Magistrates' was intended to celebrate the chief un- 
fortunate personages in English history, in a series of poetical legends 
spoken by the characters themselves, with epilogues interspersed to connect 
the stories, in imitation of Boccaccio's ' Fall of Princes,' which had been 
translated by Lydgate. The historian of English poetry ascribes the plan 



HUNNIS— SACKVILLE, EARL OF DORSET. 151 

The rest of it was political. He had been elected to parliament 
at the age of thirty. Six years afterwards, in the same year that 
his Induction and Legend of Buckingham were published, he 
went abroad on his travels,* and was, for some reason that is not 
mentioned, confined, for a time, as a prisoner at Rome ; but he 
returned home, on the death of his father, in 1566, and was soon 
after promoted to the title of Baron Buckhurst. Having entered 
at first with rather too much prodigality on the enjoyment of his 
patrimony, he is said to have been reclaimed by the indignity of 
being kept in waiting by an alderman, from whom he was bor- 
rowing money, and to have made a resolution of economy, from 
which he never departed. The Queen employed him, in the 
fourteenth year of her reign, in an embassy to Charles IX. of 
France. In 1587 he went as ambassador to the United Pro- 
vinces, upon their complaint against the Earl of Leicester ; but, 
though he performed his trust with integrity, the favourite had 
sufficient influence to get him recalled, and on his return he 
was ordered to confinement in his own house for nine or ten 
months. On Leicester's death, however, he was immediately 
reinstated in royal favour, and was made Knight of the Garter 
and Chancellor of Oxford. On the death of Burleigh he be- 
came Lord High Treasurer of England. At Queen Elizabeth's 
demise he was one of the privy councillors on whom the admi- 
nistration of the kingdom devolved, and he concurred in pro- 
claiming King James. The new sovereign confirmed him in the 
office of High Treasurer by a patent for life, and on all occa- 

of this work to Sackville, and seems to have supposed that his Induction 
and Legend of Henry Duke of Buckingham appeared in the first edition ; 
but Sir E. Brydges has shown that it was not until the second edition of * The 
Mirror for Magistrates' that Sackville's contribution was published, viz. in 
1563. Baldwin and Ferrers were the authors of the first edition, in 1559. 
Higgins, Phayer, Churchyard, and a crowd of inferior versifiers, contributed 
successive legends, not confining themselves to English history, but ti-eating 
the reader with the lamentations of Geta and Caracalla, Brennus, &c. &c., 
till the improvement of the drama superseded those dreary monologues, by 
giving heroic history a more engaging air. Sackville's contribution to 
* The Mirror for Magistrates ' is the only part of it that is tolerable. It is 
observable that his plan differs materially from that of the other contri- 
butors. He lays the scene, like Dante, in Hell, and makes his characters 
relate their history at the gates of Elysium, under the guidance of Sorrow ; 
while the authors of the other legends are generally contented with simply 
dreaming of the unfortunate personages, and, by going to sleep, offer a 
powerful inducement to follow their example. 



152 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

sions consulted him with confidence. In March, 1604, he was 
created Earl of Dorset. He died suddenly [1608] at the council- 
table, in consequence of a dropsy on the brain. Few ministers, 
as Lord Orford remarks, have left behind them so unblemished 
a character. His family considered his memory so invulnerable, 
that, when some partial aspersions were thrown upon it after his 
death, they disdained to answer them. He carried taste and 
elegance even into his formal political functions, and for his 
eloquence was styled the bell of the Star Chamber. As a poet, 
his attempt to unite allegory with heroic narrative, and his 
giving our language its earliest regular tragedy, evince the views 
and enterprise of no ordinary mind ; but, though the Induction 
to ' The Mirror for Magistrates ' displays some potent sketches, 
it bears the complexion of a saturnine genius, and resembles a 
bold and gloomy landscape on which the sun never shines. As 
to * Gorboduc,' it is a piece of monotonous recitals, and cold 
and heavy accumulation of incidents. As an imitation of clas- 
sical tragedy it is peculiarly unfortunate, in being without even 
the unities of place and time to circumscribe its dulness. 



GEORGE GASCOIGNE 

[Bom, 1536, Died, 1577.] 

"Was born in 1536,* of an ancient family in Essex, was bred at 
Cambridge, and entered at Gray*s-Inn ; but being disinherited 
by his father for extravagance, he repaired to Holland, and 
obtained a commission under the Prince of Orange. A quarrel 
with his colonel retarded his promotion in that service ; and a 
circumstance occurred which had nearly cost him his life. A 
lady at the Hague (the town being then in the enemy's posses- 
sion) sent him a letter, which was intercepted in the camp, and 
a report against his loyalty was made by those who had seized 
it. Gascoigne immediately laid the affair before the Prince, 
who saw through the design of his accusers, and gave him a 
passport for visiting his female friend. At the siege of Middle- 
burgh he displayed so much bravery that the Prince rewarded 

* Mr. Ellis conjectures that he was bom much earlier. 



G ASCOIGNE- HARRINGTON. 1 53 

him with 300 guilders above his pay ; but he was soon after 
made prisoner by the Spaniards, and, having spent four months 
in captivity, returned to England, and resided generally at 
Walthamstow. In 1575 he accompanied Queen Elizabeth in 
one of her stately progresses, and wrote for her amusement a 
masque, entitled ' The Princely Pleasures of Kenilworth Castle.' 
He is generally said to have died at Stamford in 1578 ; but the 
registers of that place have been searched in vain for his name 
by the writer of an article in the ' Censura Literaria,' * who has 
corrected some mistakes in former accounts of him. It is not 
probable, however, that he lived long after 1576, as, from a 
manuscript in the British Museum, it appears that in that year 
he complains of his infirmities, and nothing afterwards came 
from his pen. 

Gascoigne was one of the earliest contributors to our drama. 
He wrote ^ The Supposes,' a comedy, translated from Ariosto, 
and ' Jocasta,' a tragedy from Euripides, with some other pieces. 



JOHN HARRINGTON. 

[Born, 1534. Died, 1582.] 

John Harrington, the father of the translator of Ariosto, was 
imprisoned by Queen Mary for his suspected attachment to 
Queen Elizabeth, by whom he was afterwards rewarded with a 
grant of lands. Nothing that the younger Harrington has 
written seems to be worth preserving ; but the few specimens of 
his father's poetry which are found in the ' Nugse Antiquae ' 
may excite a regret that he did not write more. His love-verses 
have an elegance and terseness, more modern, by a hundred 
years, than those of his contemporaries. 

* ' Cens. Lit./ vol. i. p. 100. [Gascoigne died at Stamford on the 7tli of 
October, 1577.— See Collier's Annals, vol. i. p. 192.] 



154 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 

[Born, 1554. Died, 1586.] 

"Without enduring Lord Orford's cold-blooded depreciation of 
this hero, it must be owned that his writings fall short of his 
traditional glory ; nor were his actions of the very highest im- 
portance to his country. Still there is no necessity for supposing 
the impression which he made upon his contemporaries to have 
been either illusive or exafforerated. Traits of character will 
distinguish great men, independently of their pens or their 
swords. The contemporaries of Sydney knew the man ; and 
foreigners, no less than his own countrymen, seem to have felt, 
from his personal influence and conversation, an homage for 
him that could only be paid to a commanding intellect guiding 
the principles of a noble heart. The variety of his ambition, 
perhaps, unfavourably divided the force of his genius ; feeling 
that he could take different paths to reputation, he did not con- 
fine himself to one, but was successively occupied in the punc- 
tilious duties of a courtier, the studies and pursuits of a scholar 
and traveller, and in the life of a soldier, of which the chivalrous 
accomplishments could not be learnt without diligence and 
fatigue. All his excellence in those pursuits, and all the cele- 
brity that would have placed him among the competitors for a 
crown, was gained in a life of thirty-two years. His sagacity 
and independence are recorded in the advice which he gave to 
his own sovereign. In the quarrel with Lord Oxford* he op- 
posed the rights of an English commoner to the prejudices of 
aristocracy and of royalty itself. At home he was the patron 
of literature. All England wore mourning for his death. Per- 
haps the well-known anecdote of his generositj' to the djing 
soldier speaks more powerfully to the heart than the whole 
volumes of elegies, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, that were pub- 
lished at his death by the universities. 

* Vide the biographical notice of Lord Oxford. 



SYDNEY— GREENE. 155 



ROBERT GREENE. 

[Born, 1560. Died, 1592.] 

Was born at Norwich about 1560, was educated at Cambridge, 
travelled in Spain and Italy, and on his return held, for about a 
year, the vicarage of Tollesbury in Essex. The rest of his life 
seems to have been spent in London, with no other support than 
his pen, and in the society of men of more wit than worldly 
prudence. He is said to have died about 1592,* from a surfeit 
occasioned by pickled herrings and Rhenish wine. Greene has 
acknowledged, with great contrition, some of the follies of his 
life ; but the charge of profligacy which has been so mercilessly 
laid on his memory must be taken with great abatement, as it 
was chiefly dictated by his bitterest enemy, Gabriel Harvey, who 
is said to have trampled on his dead body when laid in the grave. 
The story, it may be hoped, for the credit of human nature, is 
untrue ; but it shows to what a pitch the malignity of Harvey 
was supposed to be capable of being excited. Greene is accused 
of having deserted an amiable wife ; but his traducers rather in- 
consistently reproach him also with the necessity of writing for 
her maintenance. 

A list of his writings, amounting to forty-five separate produc- 
tions, is given in the ' Censura Literaria,' including five plays, 
several amatory romances, and other pamphlets, of quaint titles 
and rambling contents. The writer of that article has vindi- 
cated the personal memory of Greene with proper feeling, but 
he seems to overrate the importance that could have ever been 
attached to him as a writer. In proof of the once great popu- 
larity of Greene's writings, a passage is quoted from Ben Jonson's 
* Every Man out of his Humour,' where it is said that Saviolina 
uses as choice figures as any in the ' Arcadia,' and Carlo subjoins, 
" or in Greene's works, whence she may steal with more se- 
curity." This allusion to the facility of stealing without detec- 
tion from an author surely argues the reverse of his being 

* [Greene died on the 3rd of September, 1 592. See his Dramatic Works^ 
by Dyce, 2 vols. 8vo. 1831.] 



156 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

popular and well known.* Greene's style is in truth most 
whimsical and grotesque. He lived before there was a good 
model of familiar prose ; and his wit, like a stream that is too 
weak to force a channel for itself, is lost in rhapsody and diflfuse- 
ness. 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 

[Born, 1562. Died, May, 1593.] 

"Was born in 1562, took a bachelor's degree at Cambridge, and 
came to London, where he was a contemporary player and dra- 
matic writer with Shakspeare. Had he lived longer to profit by 
the example of Shakspeare, it is not straining conjecture to sup- 
pose that the strong, misguided energy of Marlowe would have 
been kindled and refined to excellence by the rivalship ; but his 
death, at the age of thirty, is alike to be lamented for its dis- 
gracefulness and prematurity, his own sword being forced upon 
him in a quarrel at a brothel. Six tragedies, however, and his 
numerous translations from the classics, evince that if his life 
was profligate it was not idle. The bishops ordered his transla- 
tions of Ovid's Love Elegies to be burnt in public for their 
licentiousness. If all the licentious poems of that period had 
been included in the martyrdom, Shakspeare's * Venus and 
Adonis ' would have hardly escaped the flames. 

In Marlowe's tragedy of ' Lust's Dominion ' there is a scene 
of singular coincidence with an event that was two hundred years 
after exhibited in the same country, namely, Spain. A Spanish 
queen, instigated by an usurper, falsely proclaims her own son 
to be a bastard : — 

" Prince Philip is a bastard born ; 
O give me leave to blush at mine own shame ; 
But I for love to you — love to fair Spain, 
Choose rather to rip up a queen's disgrace, 
Than, by concealing it, to set the crown 
Upon a bastards head." — Lust's Dom., Act iii. sc. iv. 

Compare this avowal with the confession which Bonaparte 
either obtained, or pretended to have obtained, from the mother 
of Ferdinand VII. in 1808, and one might almost imagine that 
he had consulted Marlowe's tragedy. 

* [See Gifford's Ben Jonson, vol. ii. p. 71.] 



M AELO WE-SOUTHWELL. 1 57 



ROBERT SOUTHWELL 

[Born, 1560. Died, 1595.] 

Is said to have been descended from an ancient and respectable 
family in Norfolk, and, being sent abroad for his education, be- 
came a Jesuit at Rome. He was appointed prefect of studies 
there in 1585, and, not long after, was sent as a missionary into 
England. His chief residence was with Anne Countess of 
Arundel, who died in the Tower of London. Southwell was 
apprehended in July, 1592, and carried before Queen Elizabeth's 
agents, who endeavoured to extort from him some disclosure of 
secret conspiracies against the government ; but he was cautious 
at his examination, and declined answering a number of en- 
snaring questions ; upon which, being sent to prison, he remained 
near three years in strict confinement, was repeatedly put to the 
rack, and, as he himself affirmed, underwent very severe tortures 
no less than ten times. He owned that he was a priest and a 
Jesuit, that he came into England to preach the Catholic reli- 
gion, and was prepared to lay down his life in the cause. On 
the 20th of February, 1595, he was brought to his trial at the 
King's Bench, was condemned to die, and was executed the next 
day at Tyburn. His writings, of which a numerous list is given 
in the 67th volume of ' The Gentleman's Magazine,' together 
with the preceding sketch of his life, were probably at one time 
popular among the Catholics. In a small collection of his 
pieces there are two specimens of his prose compositions, enti- 
tled ' Mary Magdalene's Tears,' and ' The Triumph over Death,* 
which contain some eloquent sentences. Nor is it possible to 
read the volume without lamenting that its author should have 
been either the instrument of bigotry or the object of persecution.* 

* [That Southwell was hanged : yet so he had written that piece of his, 
' The Burning Babe,' he would have been content to destroy many of his. 
— Ben Jonson's Conversations with Drummond, Laing's edition, p. 13.] 



158 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



THOMAS WATSON 

[Born, 1560. Died about 1592.] 

Was a native of London, and studied the common law, but from 
the variety of his productions would seem to have devoted him- 
self to lighter studies. Mr. Steevens has certainly overrated his 
sonnets in preferring them to Shakspeare's.* 



EDMUND SPENSER, 

[Born, 1553. Died, 1598-9.] 

Descended from the ancient and honourable family of Spenser, 
was born in London, in East Smithfield, by the Tower, probably 
about the year 1 553. He studied at the University of Cambridge, 
where it appears, from his correspondence, that he formed an 
intimate friendship with the learned, but pedantic, Gabriel 
Harvey.f Spenser, with Sir Philip Sydney, was, for a time, a 
convert to Harvey's Utopian scheme for changing the measures 
of English poetry into those of the Greeks and Romans. 

Spenser even wrote trimeter iambics | sufficiently bad to 
countenance the English hexameters of his friend ; but the 
IMuse would not suffer such a votary to be lost in the pursuit 
after chimeras, and recalled him to her natural strains. From 
Cambridge Spenser went to reside with some relations in the 

* [The word Sonnet, in its laxest sense, means a small copy of verses ; in 
its true and accepted sense, a poem of fourteen lines, "written in heroic 
verse, with alternate and couplet rhymes. Watson's sonnets are all of 
eighteen lines ; and perhaps in their superfluity of four, Steevens thought 
their excellence to consist.] 

t For an account of Harvey the reader may consult Wood's Athen. Oxon., 
vol. i. Fasti col. 128. ' 

l A short example of Spenser's ' lambicum Trimetrum' will suflice, from 
a copy of verses in one of his own letters to Harvey : — 

** Unhappy verse ! the witness of my unhappy state, 
Make thyself fluttering wiugs of thy fast flying 
Thought, and fly forth unto my love, wheresoever she be, 
Whether lying restless in heavy bed, or else 
Sitting so cheerless at the cheerful board, or else 
Playing alone, careless, on her heavenly virginals." 



WATSON— SPENSER. 159 



i north of England, and, in this retirement, conceived a passion 
I for a mistress whom he has celebrated under the name of 
! Rosalind. It appears, however, that she trifled with his affection, 
i and preferred a rival. 

I Harvey, or Hobinol (by so uncouth a name did the shepherd 
I of hexameter memory, the learned Harvey, deign to be called in 
I Spenser's eclogues), with better judgment than he had shown in 
I poetical matters, advised Spenser to leave his rustic obscurity, 
' and introduced him to Sir Philip Sydney, who recommended 
I him to his uncle, the Earl of Leicester. The poet was invited 
to the family seat of Sydney at Penshurst, in Kent, where he is 
supposed to have assisted the Platonic studies of his gallant and 
congenial friend. To him he dedicated his ' Shepheard's 
Calendar.' Sydney did not bestow unqualified praise on those 
eclogues ; he allowed that they contained much poetry, but con- 
demned the antique rusticity of the language. It was of these 
eclogues, and not of ' The Fairy Queen ' (as has been frequently 
naisstaled), that Ben Jonson said, that the author in affecting the 
ancients had written no language at all.* They gained, how- 
ever, so many admirers as to pass through five editions in 
Spenser's lifetime ; and though Dove, a contemporary scholar, 
who translated them into Latin, speaks of the author being 
unknown, yet when Abraham Fraunce, in 1583, published his 
* Lawyer's Logicke,' he illustrated his rules by quotations from 
the ' Shepheard's Calendar.' 

Pope, Dryden, and Warton have extolled those eclogues, and 
Sir William Jones has placed Spenser and Gay as the only 
genuine descendants of Theocritus and Virgil in pastoral poetry. 
This decision may be questioned. Favourable as the circum- 
stances of England have been to the development of her genius 
in all the higher walks of poetry, they have not been propitious 
to the humbler pastoral muse. Her trades and manufactures, 
the very blessings of her wealth and industry, threw the indolent 
shepherd's life to a distance from her cities and capital, where 
poets, with all their love of the country, are generally found ; 
and impressed on the face of the country, and on its rustic 
manners, a gladsome, but not romantic appearance. 

In Scotland, on the contrary, the scenery, rural economy of 
* [Ben Jonson' s Worksy by Gifford, vol. ix. p. 215.] 



160 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

the country, and the songs of the peasantry, sung " at the 
watching of the fold," presented Ramsay with a much nearer 
image of pastoral life, and he accordingly painted it with the 
fresh feeling and enjoyment of nature. Had Sir William Jones 
understood the dialect of that poet, I am convinced that he 
would not have awarded the pastoral crown to any other author. 
Ramsay's shepherds are distinct, intelligible beings, neither 
vulgar, like the caricatures of Gay, nor fantastic, like those of 
Fletcher. They afford such a view of a national peasantry as 
we should wish to acquire by travelling among them ; and form 
a draft entirely devoted to rural manners, which for truth, and 
beauty, and extent, has no parallel in the richer language of 
England. Shakspeare's pastoral scenes are only subsidiary to 
the main interest of the plays where they are introduced. 
Milton's are rather pageants of fancy than pictures of real life. 
The shepherds of Spenser's ' Calendar ' are parsons in disguise, 
who converse about heathen divinities and points of Christian 
theology. Palinode defends the luxuries of the Catholic clergy, 
and Piers extols the purity of Archbishop Grindal ; concluding 
with the story of a fox, who came to the house of a goat, in the 
character of a pedlar, and obtained admittance by pretending to 
be a sheep. This may be burlesquing JEsop, but certainly is 
not imitating Theocritus. There are fine thoughts and images 
in the ' Calendar,' but, on the whole, the obscurity of those 
pastorals is rather their covering, than their principal, defect. 

In 1580, Arthur Lord Grey, of Wilton, went as Lord- 
Lieutenant to Ireland, and Spenser accompanied him as his 
secretary ; we may suppose by the recommendation of the Earl 
of Leicester. Lord Grey was recalled from his Irish govern- 
ment in 1582, and Spenser returned with him to England, 
where, by the interest of Grey, Leicester, and Sydney, he 
obtained a grant from Queen Elizabeth of 3028 acres in the 
county of Cork, out of the forfeited estates of the Earl of Des- 
mond. This was the last act of kindness which Sydney had a 
share in conferring on him : he died in the same year, furnishing 
an almost solitary instance of virtue passing through life un- 
calumniated. 

Whether Sydney was meant or not under the character of 
Prince Arthur in * The Fairy Queen/ we cannot conceive tlie 



SPENSER. 161 



poet, in describing heroic excellence, to have had the image of 
Sir Philip Sydney long absent from his mind. 

By the terras of the royal grant, Spenser was obliged to 
return to Ireland, in order to cultivate the lands assigned to him. 
His residence at Kilcolman, an ancient castle of the Earls of 
Desmond, is described, by one* who had seen its ruins, as 
situated on the north side of a fine lake, in the midst of a vast 
plain, which was terminated to the east by the Waterford 
mountains, on the north by the Ballyhowra hills, and by the 
Nagle and Kerry mountains on the south and east. It com- 
manded a view of above half the breadth of Ireland, and must 
have been, when the adjacent uplands were wooded, a most 
romantic and pleasant situation. The river Mulla, which 
Spenser has so often celebrated, ran through his grounds. In 
this retreat he was visited by Sir Walter Raleigh, at that time a 
captain in the queen's army. His visit occasioned the first re- 
solution of Spenser to prepare the first books of * The Fairy 
Queen ' for immediate publication. Spenser has commemorated 
this interview, and the inspiring influence of Raleigh's praise, 
under the figurative description of two shepherds tuning their 
pipes beneath the alders of the Mulla — a fiction with which 
the mind, perhaps, will be much less satisfied, than by recalling 
the scene as it really existed. When we conceive Spenser re- 
citing his compositions to Raleigh, in a scene so beautifully 
appropriate, the mind casts a pleasing retrospect over that in- 
fluence which the enterprise of the discoverer of Virginia, and 
the genius of the author of ' The Fairy Queen,' have respectively 
produced on the fortune and language of England. The fancy 
might even be pardoned for a momentary superstition, that the 
Genius of their country hovered, unseen, over their meeting, 
casting her first look of regard on the poet that was destined to 
inspire her future Milton, and the other on the maritime hero 
who paved the way for coloidsing distant regions of the earth, 
where the language of England was to be spoken, and the poetry 
of Spenser to be admired. Raleigh, whom the poet accompanied 
to England, introduced him to Queen Elizabeth. Her Majesty, 
in 1590-1, conferred on him a pension of 50/. a-year. In the 

* Smith's ' History of Cork,' quoted by Todd. 

M 



162 LIVES OF THE POETS.- 

patent for his pension he is not styled the laureat, but his con- 
temporaries have frequently addressed him by that title. Mr. 
Malone's discovery of the patent for this pension refutes the idle 
story of Burleigh's preventing the royal bounty being bestowed 
upon the poet, by asking if so much money was to be given for 
a song ; as well as that of Spenser's procuring it at last by the 
doggrel verses, 

" I was promised, on a time, 
To have reason for my rhyme," &c. 

Yet there are passages in ' The Fairy Queen ' which unequivo- 
cally refer to Burleigh with severity. The coldness of that 
statesman to Spenser most probably arose from the poet's attach- 
ment to Lord Leicester and Lord Essex, who were each 
successively at the head of a party opposed to the Lord Chan- 
cellor. After the publication of ' The Fairy Queen ' he returned 
to Ireland, and, during his absence, the fame which he had 
acquired by that poem (of which the first edition, however, con- 
tained only the first three books) induced his publisher to compile 
and reprint his smaller pieces.* He appears to have again 
visited London about the end of 1591, as his next publication, 
' The Elegy on Douglas Howard,' daughter of Henry Lord 
Howard, is dated January 1591-2. From this period there is a 
long interval in the history of Spenser, which was probably 
passed in Ireland, but of which we have no account. He 
married, it is conjectured, in the year 1594, when he was past 
forty ; and it appears from his ' Epithalamium ' that the nuptials 
were celebrated at Cork. In 1596 the second part of 'The 
Fairy Queen ' appeared, accompanied by a new edition of the 
first. Of the remaining six books, which would have completed 
the poet's design, only fragments have been brought lo light ; 
and there is little reason to presume that they were regularly 
furnished. Yet Mr. Todd has proved that the contemporaries 
of Spenser believed much of his valuable poetry to have been 
lost in the destruction of his house in Ireland. 

" * Viz. 1. ' The Ruins of Time.' 2. ' The Tears of the Muses.' 3. * Vir- 
cil's Gnat.' 4. ' Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubbard's Tale.' 5. * The Ruins 
of Rome, by Bellay.' 6. ' Muiopotmos, or the Tale of the Butterfly.' 7. 
'Visions of the Worlds Vanitie.' 8. ' Bellay's Visions.' 9. 'Petrarch's 
Visions.' 



SPENSER. 163 



In the same year, 1596, he presented to the queen his ' View 
of the State of Ireland,' which remained in manuscript till it 
was published by Sir James Ware in 1633. Curiosity turns 
naturally to the prose work of so old and eminent a poet, which 
exhibits him in the three-fold character of a writer delineating 
an interesting country from his own observation, of a scholar 
tracing back its remotest history, and of a politician investigating 
the causes of its calamities. The antiquities of Ireland have 
been since more successfully explored ; though on that subject 
Spenser is still a respectable authority. The great value of the 
book is the authentic and curious picture of national manners 
and circumstances which it exhibits ; and its style is as nervous 
as the matter is copious and amusing. A remarkable proposal, 
in his plan for the management of Ireland, is the establishment 
of the Anglo-Saxon system of borseholders. His political views 
are strongly coercive, and consist of little more than stationing 
proper garrisons, and abolishing ancient customs : and we find 
him declaiming bitterly against the Irish minstrels, and seriously 
dwelling on the loose mantles, and glibs, or long hair, of the 
vagrant poor, as important causes of moral depravity. But we 
ought not to try the plans of Spenser by modern circumstances, 
nor his temper by the liberality of more enlightened times. It 
was a great point to commence earnest discussion on such a 
subject. From a note in one of the oldest copies of this treatise, 
it appears that Spenser was at that time clerk to the council of 
the province of Ulster. In 1597 our poet returned to Ireland, 
and in the following year was destined to an honourable situation, 
being recommended by her Majesty to be chosen sheriff for 
Cork. But in the subsequent month of that year Tyrone's 
rebellion broke out, and occasioned his immediate flight, with 
his family, from Kilcolman. In the confusion attending this 
calamitous departure one of his children was left behind, and 
perished in the conflagration of his house when it was destroyed 
by the Irish insurgents. Spenser returned to England with a 
heart broken by distress, and died at London on the 16th of 
January, 1598-9. He was buried, according to his own desire, 
near the tomb of Chaucer ; and the most celebrated poets of the 
time (Shakspeare was probably of the number) followed his 
hearse and threw tributary verses into his grave. 

m2 



164 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

Mr. Todd^ the learned editor of his works, has proved it to 
be highly improbable that he could have died, as has been some- 
times said, in absolute want ; for he had still his pension and 
many friends, among whom Essex provided nobly for his funeral. 
Yet that he died broken-hearted and comparatively poor is but 
too much to be feared, from the testimony of his contemporaries 
Camden and Jonson. A reverse of fortune might crush his 
spirit without his being reduced to absolute indigence, especially 
with the horrible recollection of the manner in which his child 
had perished. 



JOHN LYLY 

[Bom, 1554. Died, 1600.] 

Was born in the Weald of Kent. Wood places his birth in 
1553. Oldys makes it appear probable that he was born much 
earlier.* He studied at both the universities, and for many years 
attended the court of Elizabeth in expectation of being made 
Master of the Revels. In this object he was disappointed, and 
was obliged in his old age to solicit the queen for some trifling 
grant to support him,"|" which it is uncertain whether he ever 
obtained. Very little indeed is known of him, though Blount, 
his editor, tells us that " he sate at Apollo's table, and that the 
god gave him a wreath of his own bays without snatching." 
Whether Apollo was ever so complaisant or not, it is certain 
that Lyly's work of ' Euphues and his England,' preceded by 
another called ' Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit,' &c., promoted a 
fantastic style of false wit, bombastic metaphor, and pedantic 
allusion, which it was fashionable to speak at court under the 
name of Euphuism, and which the ladies thought it iadispensable 
to acquire. Lyly, in his ' Euphues,' probably did not create the 
new style, but only collected and methodised the floating affecta- 

* [Lyly was born in Kent, in 1554, and was matriculated at Oxford iu 
1571, when it was recorded in the entry that he was seventeen years old. — 
Collier's Annals, vol. iii. p. 174,] 

f If he was an old man in the reign of Elizabeth, Oldys's conjecture as to 
the date of his birth seems to be verified — as we scarcely call a man old at 
fifty. 



LYLY— HUME. 165 



tions of phraseology. Drayton ascribes the overthrow of Euphu- 
ism to Sir Philip Sydney, who, he says, — 

" did first reduce 

Our tongue from Lylie's writing then in use, 
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies, 
Plying with word s and idle similes. 
As th' English apes and very zanies be 
Of everything that they do hear and see." 

Sydney died in 1586, and ^Euphues' had appeared but six years 

earlier. We may well suppose Sydney to have been hostile to 

such absurdity, and his writings probably promoted a better taste ; 

but we hear of Euphuism being in vogue many years after his 

death ; and it seems to have expired, like all other fashions, by 

growing vulgar. Lyly wrote nine plays, in some of which there 

is considerable wit and humour, rescued from the jargon of his 

favourite system. 

♦ 

ALEXANDER HUME 

[Born, 1560? Died, 1609?] 

Was the second son of Patrick, fifth Baron of Polwarth, from 
whom the family of Marchmont are descended. He was born 
probably about the middle and died about the end of the sixteenth 
century. During four years of the earlier part of his life he re- 
sided in France, after which he returned home and studied law, 
but abandoned the bar to try his fortune at court. There he is 
said to have been disgusted with the preference shown to a 
poetical rival, Montgomery, with whom he exchsinged Jli/tings 
(or invectives) in verse, and who boasts of having " driven Pol- 
wart from the chimney nook." He then went into the church, 
and was appointed rector or minister of Logic ; the names of 
ecclesiastical offices in Scotland then floating between presbytery 
and prelacy. In the clerical profession he continued till his 
death. Hume lived at a period when the spirit of Calvinism in 
Scotland was at its gloomiest pitch, and when a reformation, 
fostered by the poetry of Lyndsay and by the learning of Bu- 
chanan, had begun to grow hostile to elegant literature. Though 
the drama, rude as it was, had been no mean engine in the hands 
of Lyndsay against popery, yet the Scottish reformers of this latter 
period even anticipated the zeal of the English Puritans against 



166 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

dramatic and romantic poetry, which they regarded as emanations 
from hell. Hume had imbibed so far the spirit of his times as to 
publish an exhortation to the youth of Scotland to forego the 
admiration of all classical heroes, and to read no other books on 
the subject of love than the Song of Solomon. But CaMnism * 
itself could not entirely eradicate the beauty of Hume's fancy, 
and left him still the high fountain of Hebrew poetry to refresh it. 
In his ' Thanks for a Summer's Day ' there is a train of images 
that seem peculiarly pleasing and unborrowed — the pictures of 
a poetical mind, humble but genuine in its cast. 



THOMAS NASH. 

[Born, 1567. Died about 1601.] 

Thomas Nash was born at Lowestoft in Suffolk, f was bred at 
Cambridge, and closed a calamitous life of authorship at the age, 
it is said, of forty-two. Dr. Beloe has given a list of his works, 
and Mr. Disraeli an account of his shifts and miseries. Adver- 
sity seems to have whetted his genius, as his most tolerable verses 
are those which describe his own despair ; and in the midst of 
his woes he exposed to just derision the profound fooleries of the 
astrologer Harvey, who, in the year 1582, had thrown the whole 
kingdom into consternation by his predictions of the probable 
effects of the junction of Jupiter and Saturn. Drayton, in his 
* Epistle of Poets and Poesy,' says of him — 

" Sharply satiric was he, and that way 
He went, since that his being to this day, 
Few have attempted, and I surely think 
These words shall hardly be set down with ink, 
Shall blast and scorch so as his could." 

From the allusion which he makes to Sir Philip Sydney's com- 

* This once gloomy influence of Calvinism on the literary character of 
the Scottish churchmen forms a contrast with more recent times, that needs 
scarcely to be suggested to those acquainted with Scotland. In extending 
the classical fame, no less than in establishing the moral reputation of their 
country, the Scottish clergy have exerted a primary influence : and what- 
ever Presbyterian eloquence might once be, the voice of enlightened prin- 
ciples and universal charity is nowhere to be beard more distinctly than at 
the present hour from their pulpits. 

t [He was baptized at Lowestoft in Nov. 1567.— See Shakspeare Societt/'s 
Papers, vol. iii. p. 178.] 



NASH— VERE, EARL OF OXFORD. 167 

passion, it may be conjectured that he had experienced the 
bounty of that noble character : — " Gentle Sir Philip Sidney, 
thou knewst what belonged to a scholler ; thou knewst what 
pains, wliat toile, what trauell conduct to perfection : vvel couldst 
thou give euery vertue his encouragement, euery art his due, 
euery writer his desert; cause none more vertuous, witty, or 
learned than thy selfe. But thou art dead in thy grave, and hast 
left too few successors of thy glory, too ia^v to cherish the sons 
of the Muses, or water those budding hopes with their plentie, 
which thy bountie earst planted." * 



EDWARD VERE, EARL OF OXFORD. 

[Born, 1534. Died, 1604.] 

This nobleman sat as Great Chamberlain of England upon the 
trial of Mary Queen of Scots. In the year of the Armada he 
distinguished his public spirit by fitting out some ships at his 
private cost. He had travelled in Italy in his youth, and is said 
to have returned the most accomplished coxcomb of his age. 
The story of his quarrel with Sir Philip Sydney, as it is related 
by Collins, gives us a most unfavourable idea of his manners and 
temper, and shows to what a height the claims of aristocratical 
privilege were at that time carried."]" Some still more discredit- 
able traits of his character are to be found in the history of his 
life.J 

* 'Pierce Pennilesse,' 4to. 1592. 

t The Earl of Oxford, being one day in the tennis-court with Sir Philip 
Sydney, on some offence w^hich he had taken, ordered him to leave the 
room, and, on his [refusal, gave him the epithet of a puppy. Sir Philip 
retorted the lie on his lordship, and left the place, expecting to be followed 
by the peer. But Lord Oxford neither followed him nor noticed his quarrel 
till her Majesty's council had time to command the peace. The queen 
interfered, reminding Sir Philip of the difference between " earls and gentle- 
men," and of the respect which inferiors owed their superiors. Sydney, 
boldly but respectfully, stated to her Majesty that rank among freemen 
could claim no other homage than precedency, and did not obey her com- 
mands to make submission to Oxford. For a fuller statement of this anec- 
dote, vide the quotation from Collins, in ' The British Bibliographer,' vol. i. 
p. 83. 

X By Mr. Park, in the * Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors.' 



168 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



THOMAS STORER. 

[Died, 1604.] 

The date of this writer's birth can only be generally conjectured 
from his having been elected a Student of Christ Church, Oxford, 
in 1587. The slight notice of him by Wood only mentions that 
he was the son of John Storer, a Londoner, and that he died in 
the metropolis. Besides the ' History of Cardinal Wolsey,* in 
three parts, viz. his Aspiring, his Triumph, and Death, he wrote 
several pastoral pieces in ' England's Helicon.' 



JOSEPH HALL. 

[Born, 1574. Died, 1656.] 

Bishop Hall, who for his ethical eloquence has been sometimes 
denominated the Christian Seneca, was also the first who gave 
our language an example of epistolary composition in prose. He 
wrote besides a satirical fiction, entitled *]Mundus alter et idem,' 
in which, under pretence of describing the Terra Australis In- 
cognita, he reversed the plan of Sir Thomas More's ' Utopia,' 
and characterized the vices of existing nations. Of our satirical 
poetry, taking satire in its moral and dignified sense, he claims, 
and may be allowed, to be the founder ; for the ribaldry of 
Skelton and the crude essays of the graver Wyat hardly entitle 
them to that appellation.* Though he lived till beyond the 
middle of the seventeenth century, his satires were written before, 
and his *Mundus alter et idem' about, the year 1600: so that 
his antiquity, no less than his strength, gives him an important 
place in the formation of our literature. f 

In his ' Satires,' wliich were published at the age of twenty- 
three, he discovered not only the early vigour of his own genius, 

* [Donne appears to have been the first in order of composition, though 
Hall and Marston made their appearance in print before him.] 

t His name is therefore placed here with a variation from the general 
order, not according to the date of liis death, but about the time of his ap- 
pearance as a poet. 



STORER— HALL. 169 



but the powers and pliability of his native tongue. Unfortunately, 
perhaps unconsciously, he caught, from studying Juvenal and 
Persius as his models, an elliptical manner and an antique allu- 
sion, which cast obscurity over his otherwise spirited and amusing 
traits of English manners ; though the satirist himself was so far 
from anticipating this objection that he formally apologises for 
" too much stooping to the low reach of the vulgar" But in 
many instances he redeems the antiquity of his allusions by their 
ingenious adaptation to modern manners ; and this is but a small 
part of his praise ; for in the point and volubility and vigour of 
Hall's numbers we might frequently imagine ourselves perusing 
Dryden.* This may be exemplified in the harmony and pic- 
turesqueness of the following description of a magnificent rural 
mansion, which the traveller approaches in the hopes of reaching 
the seat of ancient hospitality, but finds it deserted by its selfish 
owner : — 

** Beat the broad gates, a goodly hollow sound, 

With double echoes, doth again rebound ; 

But not a dog doth bark to welcome thee, 

Nor churlish porter canst thou chafing see. 

All dumb and silent like the dead of night, 

Or dwelling of some sleepy Sybarite ; 

The marble pavement hid with desert weed. 

With houseleek, thistle, dock, and hemlock-seed. 
* * * « « 

Look to the tower'd chimneys, which should be 

The windpipes of good hospitality. 

Through which it breatheth to the open air, 

Betokening life and liberal welfare. 

Lo, there th' unthankful swallow takes her rest. 

And fills the tunnel with her circled nest." 

His satires are neither cramped by personal hostility nor spun 
out to vague declamations on vice, but give us the form and 

* The satire which I think contains the most vigorous and musical couplets 
of this old poet is the first of Book iii., beginning, 

" Time was, and that was term'd the time of gold, 
When world and time were young, that now are old." 

I preferred, however, the insertion of others as examples of his poetry, as 
they are more descriptive of English manners than the fanciful praises of 
the golden age which that satire contains. It is flowing and fanciful, but 
conveys only the insipid moral of men decaying by the progress of civilisa- 
tion — a doctrine not unlike that which Gulliver found in the book of the 
old woman of Brobdignag, whose author lamented the tiny size of the modern 
Brobdignagdians compared with that of their ancestors. 



170 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

pressure of the times exhibited in the faults of coeval literature, 
and in the foppery or sordid traits of prevailing manners. The 
age was midoubtedly fertile in eccentricity. His picture of its 
literature may at first view appear to be overcharged with severity, 
accustomed as we are to associate a general idea of excellence with 
the period of Elizabeth ; but when Hall wrote there was not a 
great poet firmly established in the language except Spenser, and 
on him he has bestowed ample applause. With regard to Shak- 
speare, the reader will observe a passage in the first satire, where 
the poet speaks of resigning the honours of heroic and tragic 
poetry to more inspired geniuses ; and it is possible that the great 
dramatist may be here alluded to, as well as Spenser. But the 
allusion is indistinct, and not necessarily applicable to the bard 
of Avon. Shakspeare's ' Romeo and Juliet,' ' Richard II.,' and 
' Richard III.' have been traced in print to no earlier date than 
the year 1597, in which Hall's first series of satires appeared; 
and we have no sufficient proof of his previous fame as a dramatist 
having been so great as to leave Hall without excuse for omitting 
to pay him homage. But the sunrise of the drama with Shak- 
speare was not without abundance of attendant mists in the con- 
temporary fustian of inferior play makers, who are severely ridi- 
culed by our satirist. In addition to this, our poetry was still 
haunted by the whining ghosts of ' The Mirror for Magistrates,' 
while obscenity walked in barbarous nakedness, and the very 
genius of the language was threatened by revolutionary pro- 
sod ists. 

From the literature of the age Hall proceeds to its manners 
and prejudices, and among the latter derides the prevalent con- 
fidence in alchymy and astrology. To us this ridicule appears 
an ordinary effort of reason ; but it was in him a common sense 
above the level of the times. If any proof were required to 
illustrate the slow departure of prejudices, it would be found in 
the fact of an astrologer being patronised, half a century after- 
wards, by the government of England.* 

* William Lilly received a pension from the council of state in 
1648. He was, besides, consulted by Charles; and during the siege of 
Colchester was sent for by the heads of the parliamentary army, to 
encourage the soldiers, by assuring them that the town would be taken. 
Fairfax told the seer that he did not understand his art, but hoped it 



JOSEPH HALL. 171 



During his youth and education he had to struggle with 
poverty ; and in his old age he was one of those suiFerers in the 
cause of episcopacy whose virtues shed a lustre on its fall. He 
was born in the parish of Ashby-de-la-Zouche, in Leicestershire, 
studied and took orders at Cambridge, and was for some time 
master of the school of Tiverton, in Devonshire. An accidental 
opportunity which he had of preaching before Prince Henry 
seems to have given the first impulse to his preferment, till by 
gradual promotion he rose to be Bishop of Exeter, having pre- 
viously accompanied King James, as one of his chaplains, to 
Scotland, and attended the Synod of Dort at a convocation of the 
Protestant divines. As Bishop of Exeter he was so mild in his 
conduct towards the Puritans, that he, who was one of the last 
broken pillars of the Church, was nearly persecuted for favouring 
them. Had such conduct been, at this critical period, pursued 
by the high churchmen in general, the history of a bloody age 
might have been changed into that of peace ; but the violence of 
Laud prevailed over the milder counsels of a Hall, an Usher, and 
a Corbet. When the dangers of the church grew more instant. 
Hall became its champion, and was met in the field of controversy 
by Milton, whose respect for the bishop's learning is ill con- 
cealed under the attempt to cover it with derision. 

By the little power that was still left to the sovereign in 1641, 
Hall was created Bishop of Norwich ; but having joined, almost 
immediately after, in the protest of the twelve prelates against 
the validity of laws that should be passed in their compelled 
absence, he was committed to the Tower, and, in the sequel, 

was lawful and agreeable to God's word. Butler alludes to this when 
he says — 

" Do not our great reformers use 

This Sidrophel to forebode news ; 

To write of victoi-ies next year, 

And castles taken yet i' th' air ? 

* * * * 

And has not he point-blank foretold 
Whats'e'er the Close Committee would ; 
Made Mars and Saturn for the Cause, 
The moon for fundamental laws ? 

* * * * 

Made all the royal stars recant, 
Compound, and take the Covenant ?" 

Hudibras, Canto iii. 



172 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

marked out for sequestration. After suffering extreme hardships, 
he was allowed to retire on a small pittance to Higham, near 
Norwich, where he continued, in comparative obscurity, but with 
indefatigable zeal and intrepidity, to exercise the duties of a 
pastor, till he closed his days at the venerable age of eighty-two. 



WILLIAM WARNER 

[Died, 1608-9.] 

"Was a native of Oxfordshire, and was born, as Mr. Ellis con- 
jectures, in 1558. He left the university of Oxford without a 
degree, and came to London, where he pursued the business of 
an attorney of the common pleas. Scott, the poet of Amwell, 
discovered that he had been buried in the church of that parish 
in 1609, having died suddenly in the night-time.* 

His ' Albion's England ' was once exceedingly popular. Its 
publication was at one time interdicted by the Star Chamber, for 
no other reason that can now be assigned but that it contains 
some love-stories more simply than delicately related. His con- 
temporaries compared him to Virgil, whom he certainly did not 
make his model. Dr. Percy thinks he rather resembled Ovid, to 
whom he is, if possible, still more unlike. His poem is, in fact, 
an enormous ballad on the history, or rather on the fables ap- 
pendant to the history of England ; heterogeneous, indeed, like 
the ' Metamorphoses,' but written with an almost doggrel sim- 
plicity. Headley has rashly preferred his works to our ancient 
ballads ; but with the best of these they will bear no comparison. 
' Argentile and Cnran ' has indeed some beautiful touches, yet 
that episode requires to be weeded of many lines to be read with 
unqualified pleasure ; and through the rest of his stories we shall 
search in vain for the familiar magic of such ballads as ' Chevy 
Chase ' or ' Gill Morrice.' 

* [9th March, 1608-9.] 



WAKNER— HARRINGTON— PERROT—OVERBURY. 1 73 

SIR JOHN HARRINGTON. 

[Bora, 1561 ? Died, 1612?] 

The poetry of Sir John Harrington's father is so polished and 
refined as almost to warrant a suspicion that the editor of the 
'Nugse Antiques' got it from a more modern quarter. The 
elder Harrington was imprisoned in the Tower, under Queen 
Mary, for holding a correspondence with Elizabeth ; on whose 
accession his fidelity was rewarded by her favour. His son, the 
translator of Ariosto, was knighted on the field by the Earl of 
Essex, not much to the satisfaction of Elizabeth, who was sparing 
of such honours, and chose to confer them herself. He was 
created a Knight of the Bath in the reign of James, and dis- 
tinguished himself, to the violent offence of the high church 
party, by his zeal against the marriage of bishops. 



HENRY PERROT. 

Perrot, I suspect, was not the author, but only the collector, 
of his book of epigrams entitled 'Springes for Woodcocks,' 
some of which are claimed by other epigrammatists, probably 
with no better right. It is indeed very diflScult to ascertain the 
real authors of a vast number of little pieces of the 16th and 
17th centuries, as the minor poets pilfer from each other with 
the utmost coolness and apparent impunity. 



SIR THOMAS OVERBURY 

[Born, 1581. Died, 1613.] 

Was born in 1581, and perished in the Tower of London, 1613, 
by a fate that is too well known. The compassion of the public 
for a man of worth, " whose spirit still walked unrevenged 
amongst them," together with the contrast of his ideal Wife 
with the Countess of Essex, who was his murderess, attached an 
interest and popularity to his poem, and made it pass through 
sixteen editions before the year 1653. His ' Characters, or Witty 



174 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

Descriptions of the Properties of Sundry Persons,' is a work of 
considerable merit ; but unfortunately his prose, as well as his 
verse, has a dryness and quaintness that seem to oppress the 
natural movement of his thoughts. As a poet he has few im- 
posing attractions: his beauties must be fetched by repeated 
perusal. They are those of solid reflection, predominating over, 
but not extinguishing, sensibility ; and there is danger of the 
reader neglecting, under the coldness and ruggedness of his 
manner, the manly but unostentatious moral feeling that is con- 
veyed in his maxims, which are sterling and liberal, if we can 
only pardon a few obsolete ideas on female education. 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH. 

[Born, 1552. Died, 1618.] 

It is difficult exactly to estimate the poetical character of this 
great man, as many of the pieces that are ascribed to him have 
not been authenticated. Among these is * The Soul's Errand,'* 
which possesses a fire of imagination that we would willingly 
ascribe to him ; but his claim to it, as has been already men- 
tioned, is exceedingly doubtful. The tradition of his having 
written it on the night before his execution is highly interesting 
to the fancy, but, like many fine stories, it has the little defect of 
being untrue, as the poem was in existence more than twenty 
years before his death. f 

Sir Walter was born at Hayes Farm, in Devonshire, and 
studied at Oxford. Leaving the university at seventeen, he 
fought for six years under the Protestant banners in France, and 
afterwards served a campaign in the Netherlands. He next dis- 

* [Or, * The Lie.'— Ante, p. 74.] 

t This bold and spirited poem has been ascribed to several authors, but 
to none on satisfactory authority. It can be traced to MS. of a date as early 
as 1593, when Francis Davison, who published it in his ' Poetical Rhapsody' 
[1608], was too young to be supposed, with much probability, to have 
written it ; and as Davison's work was a compilation, his claims to it must 
be very doubtful. Sir Egerton Brydges has published it among Sir AValter 
Raleigh's poems, but without a tittle of evidence to show that it was the 
production of that great man. 

['The Lie' is ascribed to Sir Walter Raleigh in an answer to it written 
at the time, and recently discovered in a MS. in the Chetham Library at 
Manchester. That it was written by Raleigh is now almost past a doubt] 



SIR WALTER RALEIGH. 175 

tinguished himself in Ireland during the rebellion of 1580, under 
the lord-deputy, Lord Grey de Wilton, with whom his personal 
disputes eventually promoted his fortunes ; for being heard in 
his own cause on returning to England, he won the favour of 
Elizabeth, who knighted him and raised him to such honours as 
alarmed the jealousy of her favourite Leicester. 

In the mean time, as early as 1579, he had commenced his 
adventures with a view to colonize America — surveyed the terri- 
tory now called Virginia in 1584, and fitted out successive fleets 
in support of the infant colony. In the destruction of the 
Spanish Armada, as well as in the expedition to Portugal in be- 
half of Don Antonio, he had his full share of action and glory ; 
and though recalled, in 1592, from the appointment of general 
of the expedition against Panama, he must have made a princely 
fortune by the success of his fleet, which sailed upon that occa- 
sion and returned with the richest prize that had ever been 
brought to England. The queen was about this period so in- 
dignant with him for an amour which he had with one of her 
maids of honour, that, though he married the lady (she was the 
daughter of Sir Nicholas Throgmorton), her Majesty committed 
him, with his fair partner, to the Tower. The queen forgave 
him, however, at last, and rewarded his services with a grant of 
the manor of Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, where he built a magni- 
ficent seat. Ealeigh's mind was not one that was destined to 
travel in the wheel-ruts of common prejudice. It was rumoured 
that he had carried the freedom of his philosophical speculation 
to an heretical height on many subjects ; and his acceptance of 
the church-lands of Sherborne, already mentioned, probably sup- 
plied additional motives to the clergy to swell the outcry against 
his'principles. He was accused (by the Jesuits) of atheism — a 
charge which his own writings sufficiently refute. Whatever 
were his opinions, the public saved him the trouble of explaining 
them ; and the queen, taking it for granted that they must be 
bad, gave him an open and no doubt edifying reprimand. To 
console himself under these circumstances, he projected the con- 
quest of Guiana, sailed thither in 1595, and, having captured 
the city of San Joseph, returned and published an account of his 
voyage. In the following year he acted gallantly under the Earl 
of Essex at Cadiz, as well as in what was called the '' Island 



176 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

Voyage."* On the latter occasion he failed of complete success 
only through the jealousy of the favourite. 

His letter to Cecil, in which he exhorted that statesman to 
the destruction of Essex, forms but too sad and notorious a blot 
in our hero's memory ; yet even that offence will not reconcile 
us to behold the successor of Elizabeth robbing Raleigh of his 
estate to bestow it on the minion Carr, and, on the grounds of a 
plot in which his participation was never proved, condemning to 
fifteen years of imprisonment the man who had enlarged the em- 
pire of his country and the boundaries of human knowledge. 
James could estimate the wise, but shrank from cordiality with 
the brave. He released Raleigh from avaricious hopes about 
the mine of Guiana, and, when disappointed in that object, sacri- 
ficed him to motives still baser than avarice. On the 29th of 
October, 1618, Raleigh perished on a scaffold, in Old Palace- 
yard, by a sentence originally iniquitous, and which his commis- 
sion to Guiana had virtually revoked. 



JOSHUA SYLVESTER, 

[Born, 15G3. Died, 1618.] 

"Who in his day obtained the epithet of the Silver-tongued, was 
a merchant adventurer, and died abroad at Middleburgh, in 1618. 
He was a candidate, in the year 1 597, for the office of secretary 
to a trading company at Stade ; on which occasion the Earl of 
Essex seems to have taken a friendly interest in his fortunes. 
Though esteemed by the court of England (on one occasion he 
signs himself the pensioner of Prince Henry), | he is said to have 
been driven from home by the enmity which his satires excited. 
This seems very extraordinary, as there is nothing in his vague 
and dull declamations against vice that needed to have ruffied 
the most thin-skinned enemies ; so that his travels were probably 
made more from the hope of gain than the fear of persecution. 

* A voyage that was aimed principally at the Spanish Plate fleets. 

f [He had a yearly pension of twenty pounds from Prince Henry. See 
' Extracts from Accounts of Revels at Court," Introduction, p. xvii. For 
other new facts about Sylvester, see Mr. Collier's Introduction to his 
« Memoirs of the Principal Actors in the Plays of Shakespeare," 8vo. 1846.] 



SYLVESTER— DANIEL. 177 

He was an eminent lingiiist, and writes his dedications in several 
languages, but in his own he often fathoms the bathos, and 
brings up such lines as these to king James : — 

" So much, O king, thy sacred worth presume I on, 
James, the just heir of England's lawful union." 

His works are chiefly translations, including that of ' The Divine 
Weeks and Works * of Du Bartas. His claim to the poem of 
* The Soul's Errand,' as has been already mentioned, is to be 
entirely set aside. 



SAMUEL DANIEL. 

[Born, 1562. Died, Oct. 1619.] 

Samuel Daniel was the son of a music-master, and was born 
at Taunton, in Somersetshire. He was patronised and probably 
maintained at Oxford by the noble family of Pembroke. At the 
age of twenty-three he translated Paulus Jovius's * Discourse of 
Eare Inventions.' He was afterwards tutor to the accomplished 
and spirited Lady Anne Clifford, daughter to the Earl of Cum- 
berland, who raised a monument to his memory, on which she 
recorded that she had been his pupil. At the death of Spenser 
he furnished, as a voluntary laureat, several masks and pageants 
for the court, but retired, with apparent mortification, before the 
ascendant favour of Jonson.* 

While composing his dramas he lived in Old-street, St. Luke's, 
which w^as at that time thought retirement from London ; but 
at times he frequented the city, and had the honour of ranking 
Shakspeare and Selden among his friends. In his old age he 
turned husbandman, and closed his days at a farm in Somerset- 
shire. 

* The latest editor of Jonson [Gifford] affirms the whole conduct of that 
great poet towards Daniel to have been perfectly honourable. Some small 
exception to this must be made when we turn to the derision of Daniel's 
verses, which is pointed out by the editor himself, in * Cynthia's Eevels.' 
This was unworthy of Jonson, as the verses of Daniel atVhich he sneers are 
not contemptible, and as Daniel was confessedly an amiable man, who died 
" beloved, honoured, and lamented." 



178 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



GILES AND PHINEAS FLETCHER. 

[Giles Fletcher died, 1623. Phineas Fletcher died about 1650.] 

The affinity and genius of these two poets naturally associate 
their names. They were the cousins of Fletcher the dramatist, 
and the sons of a Dr. Giles Fletcher, who, among several 
important missions in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, negotiated 
a commercial treaty with Russia, greatly to the advantage of 
England, in spit€ of many obstacles that were presented by a 
capricious czar and a barbarous court. His remarks on Russia 
were suppressed on their first appearance, but were afterwards 
republished in 1643, and incorporated with Hakluyt's * Voy- 
ages. ' 

Mr. A. Chalmers, in his ' British Poets,' mentions Giles as the 
elder son of this Dr. Fletcher, evidently by mistake, as Giles in 
his poetry speaks of his own " green Muse hiding her younger 
head," with reference to his senior brother. Giles was bred at 
Cambridge, and died at his living of Alderston, in Suffolk, in 
1623. Phineas was educated at the same university, and wrote 
an account of its founders and learned men. He was also a 
clergyman, and held the living of Hilgay, in Norfolk, for twenty- 
nine years. They were both the disciples of Spenser, and, with 
his diction gently modernised, retained much of his melody and 
luxuriant expression. Giles, inferior as he is to Spenser and 
Milton, might be figured, in his happiest moments, as a link of 
connexion in our poetry between those congenial spirits, for he 
reminds us of both, and evidently gave hints to the latter in a 
poem on the same subject with ' Paradise Regained.' 

Giles's ' Christ's Victory and Triumph ' has a tone of enthu- 
siasm peculiarly solemn. Phineas, with a livelier fancy, had a 
worse taste. He lavished on a bad subject the graces and inge- 
nuitj'- that would have made a fine poem on a good design. 
Through five cantos of his ' Purple Island ' he tries to sweeten 
the language of anatomy by the flowers of poetry, and to support 
the wings of allegory by bodily instead of spiritual phenomena. 
Unfortunately in the remaining cantos he only quits the dissect- 



GILES AND PHINEAS FLETCHER. 179 

ing-table to launch into the subtlety of the schools, and describes 
Intellect, the Prince of the Isle of Man, with his eight counsel- 
lors, Fancy, Memory, the Common Sense, and the five external 
Senses, as holding out in the Human Fortress against the Evil 
Powers that besiege it. Here he strongly resembles the old 
Scottish poet, Gawain Douglas, in his poem of * King Hart.' 
But he outstrips all allegorists in conceit, when he exhibits 
Voletta, or the Will, the wife of Intellect, propped in her faint- 
ing-fits by Repentance, who administers restorative waters to the 
queen, made with lip's confession and with " pickled sighs," stilled 
in the alembic of a broken spirit. At the approach of the com- 
bat between the good and evil powers, the interest of the narra- 
tion is somewhat quickened, and the parting of the sovereign 
and the queen, with their champions, is not unfeelingly por- 
trayed : — 

" Long at the gate the thoughtful Intellect 

Stay'd with his fearful queen and daughter fair ; 
But when the knights were past their dim aspect, 
They follow them with vows and many a prayer. 
At last they climb up to the castle's height. 
From which they view'd the deeds of every knight, 
And mark'd the doubtful end of this intestine fight. 

As when a youth, bound for the Belgic war, 
Takes leave of friends upon the Kentish shore, 
Now are they parted ; and he sail'd so far, 
They see not now, and now are seen no more ; 
Yet, far off, viewing the white trembling sails, 
The tender mother soon plucks off her vails. 
And, shaking them aloft, unto her son she hails." 

But the conclusion of * The Purple Island ' sinks into such 
absurdity and adulation, that we could gladly wish the poet back 
again to allegorising the bladder and kidneys. In a contest 
about the eternal salvation of the human soul, the event is 
decided by King James I. (at that time a sinner upon earth) 
descending from heaven with his treatise on the Revelation 
under his arm, in the form of an angel, and preceding the 
Omnipotent, who puts the forces of the dragon to the rout. 

These incongruous conceptions are clothed in harmony, and 
interspersed with beautiful thoughts : but natural sentiments and 
agreeable imagery will not incorporate with the shapeless features 
of such a design ; they stand apart from it like things of a dif- 
ferent element, and, when they occur, only expose its deformity. 

N 2 



180 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

On the contrary, in the brother's poem of ' Christ's Triumph,' 
its main effect, though somewhat sombrous, is not marred by such 
repulsive contrasts ; its beauties, therefore, all tell in relieving 
tedium, and reconciling- us to defects. 



HENRY CONSTABLE, 

[Bom, 1568? Died, 1604?] 

Born, according to Mr. Ellis's conjecture, about 1568, was a 
noted sonnetteer of his time. Dr. Birch, in liis * Memoirs of 
Queen Elizabeth,' supposes that he was the same Henry Con- 
stable 'who, for his zeal in the Catholic religion, was long 
obliged to live in a state of banishment. He returned to Eng- 
land, however, about the beginning of James's reign. The time 
of his death is unknown. 



NICHOLAS BRETON. 

[Bom, 1555, Died, 1624.] 

Mr. Ellis conjectures that this writer was born in 1555, and 
died in 1624. He is supposed by Mr. Ritsou to be the same 
Captain IS^icholas Breton whose monument is still in the church 
of IS^orton, in which parish his family were lords of the manor 
till within these few years. His happiest vein is in little pastoral 
pieces. In addition to the long roll of his indifferent works 
which are enumerated in the ' Biographia Poetica,' the ' Censura 
Literaria ' imputes to him a novel of singular absurdity, in 
which the miseries of the heroine of the story are consmnmated 
by having her nose bit off by an aged and angry rival of her 
husband. 



DR. THOMAS LODGE 

[Bora, 1556. Died, 1625.] 

"Was of a family in Lincolnshire, and was educated at Oxford. 
He practised as a physician in London, and is supposed to have 



BRETON— LODGE— BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 181 

fallen a martyr to the memorable plague of 1625, He wrote 
several plays and other poetical works of considerable merit, and 
translated the works of Josephus into English. 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 

[Born, 1586. Died, 1616. Born, 1579. Died, 1625.] 

Those names, united by friendship and confederate genius, 
ought not to be disjoined. Francis Beaumont was the son of 
Judge Beaumont of the Common Pleas, and was born at Grace- 
Dieu, in Liecestershire, in 1586. He studied at Oxford, and 
passed from thence to the Inner Temple ; but his application to 
the law cannot be supposed to have been intense, as his first play, 
in conjunction with Fletcher, was acted in his twenty-first year, 
and the short remainder of his life was devoted to the drama. 
He married Ursula, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Henry Isley, 
of Kent, by whom he had two daughters, one of whom was alive, 
at a great age, in the year 1700. He died in 1616, and was 
buried at the entrance of St. Benedict's chapel, near the Earl of 
Middlesex's monument, in the collegiate church of St. Peter, 
Westminster. As a lyrical poet, F. Beaumont would be entitled 
to some remembrance independent of his niche in the drama. 

John Fletcher was the son of Dr. Richard Fletcher, Bishop of 
London: he was born, probably in the metropolis, in 1576, and 
was admitted a pensioner of Bennet College about the age of 
fifteen.* His time and progress at the university have not been 
traced, and only a few anecdotes have been gleaned about the 
manner of his life and death. Before the marriage of Beaumont, 
we are told by Aubrey that Fletcher and he lived together in 
London, near the Bankside, not far from the theatre, had one 
* * * in the same house between them, the same clothes, cloak, 
&c. Fletcher died in the great plague of 1625. A friend had 
invited him to the country, and he unfortunately stayed in town to 
get a suit of clothes for the visit, during which time he caught 
the fatal infection. He was interred in St. Saviour's, South wark, 

* [He was born at Rye, in Sussex, and baptized there, as the register re- 
cords, December 20, 1579. — Dyce's Beaumont and Fletchert vol. i. p. xviii.] 



182 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

where his grave, like that of Beaumont's in Westminster, is 

without an inscription. 

Fletcher survived his dramatic associate ten years ; so that 

their share in the drama that passes by their joint names was far 

from equal in quantity, Fletcher having written between thirty 

and forty after the death of his companion.* Eespectinp^ those 

which appeared in their common lifetime, the general account is, 

that Fletcher chiefly supplied the fancy and invention of their 

pieces, and that Beaumont, though he was the younger, dictated 

the cooler touches of taste and accuracy. This tradition is 

supported, or rather exaggerated, in the verses of Cartwright to 

Fletcher, in which he says — 

" Beaumont was fain 
To bid thee be more dull ; that's write again, 
And bate some of thy fire, which from thee came 
In a clear, bright, full, but too large a flame." 

Many verses to the same effect might be quoted ; but this tra- 
dition, so derogatory to Beaumont's genius, is contradicted by 
other testimonies of rather an earlier date, and coming from 
writers who must have known the great dramatist themselves 
much better than Cartwright. Ben Jonson speaks of Beaumont's 
originality with the emphasis peculiar to the expression of all his 
opinions ; and Earle, the intimate friend of Beaumont, ascribed to 
him, while Fletcher was still alive, the exclusive claim to those 
three distinguished plays, * The Maid's Tragedy,' ' Philaster,' 
and ' King and No King ' — a statement which Fletcher's friends 
were likely to have contradicted if it had been untrue. If Beau- 
mont had the sole or chief merit of those pieces, he could not 
have been what Cartwright would have us believe— the mere 
pruner of Fletcher's luxuriancies ; an assessor, who made him 
write again, and more dully. Indeed, with reverence to their 
memories, nothing that they have left us has much the appearance 
of being twice written : and whatever their amiable editor, 
Mr. Seward, may say about the correctness of their plots, the 
management of their stories would lead us to suspect that neither 
of the duumvirate troubled themselves much about correctness. 
Their charm is, vigour and variety ; their defects, a coarseness 

* Fletcher was assisted by Massinger in one instance, probably in several ; 
and it is likely that after Beaumont's death he bad other auxiliaries. [Row- 
ley, Middleton, and Shirley were his other assistants.] 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 183 

and grotesqueness that betray no circumspection. There is so 
much more hardihood than discretion in the arrangement of their 
scenes, that, if Beaumont's taste and judgment had the disposal of 
them, he fully proved himself the junior partner. But it is not 
probable that their departments were so divided. 

Still, however, the scanty lights that enable us to guess at what 
they respectively wrote seem to warrant that distinction in the cast 
of their genius which is made in the poet's allusion to 

*' Fletcher's keen treble, and deep Beaumont's base." 
Beaumont was the deeper scholar ; Fletcher is said to have been 
more a man of the world. Beaumont's vein was more pathetic 
and solemn, but he was not without humour ; for the mock-heroic 
scenes, that are excellent in some of their plays, are universally 
ascribed to him. Fletcher's Muse, except where she sleeps in 
pastorals, seems to have been a nymph of boundless unblushing 
pleasantry. Fletcher's admirers warmly complimented his ori- 
ginality at the expense of Beaumont,* on the strength of his 
superior gaiety ; as if gay thoughts must necessarily be more 
original than serious ones, or depth of sensibility be allied to 
shallowness of invention. We are told also that Beaumont's taste 
leant to the hard and abstract school of Jonson, while his coad- 
jutor followed the wilder graces of Shakspeare. But, if Earle 
can be credited for Beaumont's having written * Philaster,' we 
shall discover him in that tragedy to be the very opposite of an 
abstract painter of character ; it has the spirit of individual life. 
The piece owes much less to art than it loses by negligence. Its 
forms and passions are those of romance ; and its graces, evidently 
imitated from Shakspeare, want only the fillet and zone of art to 
consummate their beauty. 

On the whole, while it is generally allowed that Fletcher was 
the gayer, and Beaumont the graver genius of their amusing 
theatre, it is unnecessary to depreciate either, for they were both 
original and creative ; or to draw invidious comparisons between 
men who themselves disdained to be rivals. 

* [At the expense of all genius ; for in the panegyrical poems in which 
Fletcher is so warmly complimented, and to which Mr. Campbell alludes, 
the writers wrote to say good things that looked like true, and were satis- 
fied when the arrow of adulation was drawn to the head. Commendatory 
poems at the best reflect very little of real opinion, and when brought into 
biography are more apt to mislead than inform.] 



184 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



SIR JOHN DAVIES. 

[Bom, 1570. Died, 1626.] 

Sir John Davies wrote, at twenty-five years of age, a poem on 
the Immortality of the Soul; and, at fifty -two, when he was 
a judge and a statesman, another on the art of dancing* 
"Well might the teacher of that noble accomplishment, in Moliere's 
comedy, exclaim, " La philosophie est quelque chcse — mais la 
danse /" 

Sir John was the son of a practising lawyer at Tisbury, in 
"Wiltshire. He was expelled from the Temple for beating 
Kichard Martin,! who was afterwards Recorder of London ; but 
his talents redeemed the disgrace. He was restored to the 
Temple, and elected to parliament, where, although he had flat- 
tered Queen Elizabeth in his poetry, he distinguished himself by 
supporting the privileges of the House, and by opposing royal 
monopolies. On the accession of King James he went to Scot- 
land with Lord Hunsdon, and was received by the new sovereign 
with flattering cordiality, as the author of the poem 'Nosce 
Teipsum.' In Ireland he was successively nominated solicitor 
and attorney general, was knighted, and chosen speaker of the 
Irish House of Commons, in opposition to the Catholic interest. 
Two works which he published as the fruits of his observation 
in that kingdom have attached considerable importance to his 
name in the legal and political history of Ireland. | On his 
return to England he sat in parliament for Newcastle-under-Lyne, 
and had assurances of being appointed chief justice of England, 
when his death was suddenly occasioned by apoplexy. He mar- 
ried, while in Ireland, Eleanor, a daughter of Lord Audley, by 

♦ [This is not the case; the * Poeme of Dauncing' appeared in 1596, in 
his twenty-sixth year, and, curious enough, with a dedicatory sonnet '* To his 
very Friend, Ma. Eich. Martin." A copy, supposed unique, is in the Bridge- 
water Library. The poem was the work of fifteen days. — See Colliers 
Bibliographical Catalogue, p. 92. The poet wrote his name Dauys.] 
f A respectable man, to whom Ben Jouson dedicated his ' Poetaster.' 
j The works are ' A Discovery of the Causes why Ireland was never 
subdued till the beginning of his Majesty's Reign,' and'Eeports of Cases 
adjudgedin the King s Courts in Ireland.' 



DAVIES— GOFFE— GREVILLE— SIR J. BEAUMONT. 185 

whom he had a daughter, who was married to Ferdinand Lord 
Hastings, afterwards Earl of Huntingdon. Sir John's widow 
turned out an enthusiast and a prophetess. A volume of her 
ravings was published in 1649, for which the revolutionary go- 
vernment sent her to the Tower, and to Bethlehem Hospital. 



THOMAS GOFFE. 

[Born, 1592. Died, 1627.] 

This writer left four or five dramatic pieces, of very ordinary 
merit. He was bred at Christ's Church, Oxford. He held the 
living of East Clandon, in Surrey, but unfortunately succeeded 
not only to the living, but to the widow of his predecessor, who, 
being a Xantippe, contributed, according to Langbaine, to 
shorten his days by the ^^ violence of her provoking tongue.'^ He 
had the reputation of an eloquent preacher, and some of his 
sermons appeared in print. 



SIR FULKE GREVILLE, 

[Born, 1554. Died, 1628.] 

Who ordered this inscription for his own grave — '' Servant to 
Queen Elizabeth, counsellor to King James, and friend to Sir 
Philip Sydney " — was created knight of the bath at James's coro- 
nation, afterwards appointed sub-treasurer, chancellor of the 
exchequer, and made a peer, by the title of Baron Brooke, in 
1621. He died by the stab of a revengeful servant in 1628.* 



SIR JOHN BEAUMONT. 

[Born, 1582. Died, 1628.] 

Sir John Beaumont, brother of the celebrated dramatic poet, 
was born at Grace-Dieu, the seat of the family, in Leicestershire. 

* [It seems to me that Dryden has formed his tragic style more upon 
Lord Brooke than upon any other author. — Southey, MS. Note in Lord 
Brooke's Works, 1G33.] 



186 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

He studied at Oxford and at the inns of court ; but, forsakino- 
the law, married and retired to his native seat. Two years 
before his death he was knighted by Charles I. 

He wrote * The Crown of Thorns,' a poem, of which no copy is 
known to be extant ; * Bosworth Field,' and a variety of small 
original and translated pieces. ' Bosworth Field ' may be com- 
pared with Addison's ' Campaign,' without a high compliment to 
either. Sir John has no fancy, but there is force and dignity in 
some of his passages ; and he deserves notice as one of the earliest 
polishers of what is called the heroic couplet.* 



MICHAEL DRAYTON. 

[Bom, 1570? Died, 1631.] 

Michael Drayton was born in the parish of Atherston, in 
Warwickshire. His family was ancient ; but it is not probable that 
his parents were opulent, for he was educated chiefly at the expense 
of Sir Godfrey Godere. In his childhood, which displayed 
remarkable proficiency, he was anxious to know what strange 
kind of beings poets were ; and on his coming to college he im- 
portuned his tutor, if possible, to make him a poet. Either from 
this ambition, or from necessity, he seems to have adopted no 
profession, and to have generally owed his subsistence to the 
munificence of friends. An allusion which he makes, in the 
poem of ' Moses' Birth and Miracles,' to the destruction of the 
Spanish Armada, has been continually alleged as a ground for 
supposing that he witnessed that spectacle in a militarj' capacity ; 
but the lines, in fact, are far from proving that he witnessed it at 
all. On the accession of King James I. he paid his court to 
the new sovereign with all that a poet could ofifer — his congra- 
tulatory verses. James, however, received him but coldly ; and 
though he was patronized by Lord Buckhurst and the Earl of 

* [" Earth helped him with a cry of blood." This line is from * Tlie 
Battle of Bosworth Field,' by Sir John Beaumont (brother to the drama- 
tist), whose poems are written with much spirit, elegance, and harmony, 
and have deservedly been reprinted in Chalmers's ' Collection of English 
Poets.' — Wordsworth, Notes to the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle.] 



DRAYTON. 187 



Dorset,* he obtained no situation of independence, but continued 
to publish his voluminous poetry amidst severe irritations with his 
booksellers.t Popular as Drayton once was, in comparison of 
the present neglect of him, it is difficult to conceive that his works 
were ever so profitable as to allow the bookseller much room for 
peculation. He was known as a poet many years before the 
death of Queen Elizabeth. His ' Poly-olbion,' which the learned 
Selden honoured with notes, did not appear till 1613. In 1626 
we find him styled poet laureat ; but the title at that time Avas 
often a mere compliment, and implied neither royal appointment 
nor butt of canary. The Countess of Bedford supported him for 
many years. At the close of his life we find him in the family 
of the Earl of Dorset, to whose magnanimous countess the 
Aubrey MSS. ascribe the poet's monument over his grave in 
Westminster Abbey. 

The language of Drayton is free and perspicuous. With less 
depth of feeling than that which occasionally bursts from Cowley, 
he is a less excruciating hunter of conceits, and in harmony of 
expression is quite a contrast to Donne. A tinge of grace and 
romance pervades much of his poetry ; and even his pastorals, 
which exhibit the most fantastic views of nature, sparkle with 
elegant imagery. The * Nymphidia' is in his happiest character- 
istic manner of airy and sportive pageantry. In some historic 
sketches of ' The Barons' Wars ' he reaches a manner beyond 
himself — the pictures of Mortimer and the queen, and of 
Edward's entrance to the castle, are splendid and spirited. In 
his ' Poly-olbion,' or description of Great Britain, he has treated 
the subject with such topographical and minute detail as to chain 
his poetry to the map ; and he has unfortunately chosen a form 
of verse which, though agreeable when interspersed with other 
measures, is fatiguing in long continuance by itself: still it is 
impossible to read the poem without admiring the richness of his 
local associations, and the beauty and variety of the fabulous 
allusions which he scatters around him. Such indeed is the pro- 

* [Lord Buckhurst and the Earl of Dorset— the poet and lord high 
treasurer — are one and the same person.] 

t [He received a yearly pension of ten pounds from Prince Henry, to 
■whom he dedicated his ' Poly-olbion.' See extracts from the ' Accounts of the 
Bevels at Court,' Introduction, p. xvii.] 



188 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

fusion of romantic recollections in the ' Poly-olbion,' that a poet 
of taste and selection might there find subjects of happy descrip- 
tion, to which the author who suggested them had not the power 
of doing justice ; for Drayton started so many remembrances that 
he lost his inspiration in the effort of memory. In * The Barons' 
Wars,' excepting the passages already noticed, where the 

" Purpureus late qui splendeat unus et alter, 
Assuitur pannus," 

we unhappily exchange only the geographer for the chronicler. 
On a general survey, the mass of his poetry has no strength or 
sustaining spirit adequate to its bulk. There is a perpetual play 
of fancy on its surface ; but the impulses of passion, and the 
guidance of judgment, give it no strong movements nor consistent 
course. In scenery or in history he cannot command selected 
views, but meets them by chance as he travels over the track of 
detail. His great subjects have no interesting centre, no shade 
for uninteresting things. Not to speak of his dull passages, his 
description is generally lost in a flutter of whimsical touches. 
His Muse had certainly no strength for extensive flights, though 
she sports in happy moments on a brilliant and graceful wing.* 



EDWARD FAIRFAX. 

[Died, 1632?] 

Edward Fairfax, the truly poetical translator of Tasso, was 
the second son of Sir Thomas Fairfax, of Denton, in Yorkshire. 
His family were all soldiers ; but the poet, while his brothers 
were seeking military reputation abroad, preferred the quiet en- 
joyment of letters at home. He married and settled as a private 
gentleman at Fuyston, a place beautifully situated between the 

♦ [" Drayton's * Poly-olbion ' is a poem of about 30,000 lines in length, 
■written in Alexandrine couplets, a measure, from its monotony, and per- 
haps from its frequency in doggrel ballads, not at all pleasing to the ear. It 
contains a topographical description of England, illustrated yith a prodi- 
gality of historical and legendary erudition. Such a poem is essentially 
designed to instruct, and speaks to the understanding more than to the fancy. 
The powers displayed in it are, however, of a high cast. Yet perhaps no 
English poem, known as well by name, is so little known beyond its name." 
— Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. iii. p. 496-7.] 



FAIEFAX. 189 



family seat at Denton and the forest of Knaresborough. Some 
of his time was devoted to the management of his brother Lord 
Fairfax's property, and to superintending the education of his 
lordship's children. The prose MSS. which he left in the library 
of Denton sufficiently attest his literary industry. They have 
never been published, and, as they relate chiefly to religious 
controversy, are not likely to be so ; although his treatise on 
witchcraft, recording its supposed operation upon his own family, 
must form a curious relic of superstition. Of Fairfax it might, 
therefore, well be said — 

" Prevailing poet, whose undoubting mind 
Believed the magic wonders which he sung."* 

Of his original works in verse, his ' History of Edward the 
Black Prince' has never been published; but Mr. A. Chalmers 
('Biog. Diet.,' art. Fairfax) is, I believe, as much mistaken in 
supposing that his Eclogues have never been collectively printed, 
as in pronouncing them entitled to high commendation for their 
poetry.t A more obscurely stupid allegory and fable can hardly 
be imagined than the fourth Eclogue, preserved in Mrs. Cooper's 
' Muse's Library:' its being an imitation of some of the theolo- 
gical pastorals of Spenser is no apology for its absurdity. When 
a fox is described as seducing the chastity of a lamb, and when 
the eclogue writer tells us that 

" An hundred times her virgin lip he kiss'd, 
As oft her maiden finger gently wrung," 

who could imagine that either poetry, or ecclesiastical history, 
or sense or meaning of any kind, was ever meant to be conveyed 
under such a conundrum ? 

The time of Fairfax's death has not been discovered ; it is 
known that he was alive in 1631 ; but his translation of the ' Je- 
rusalem ' was published when he was a young man, was inscribed 
to Queen Elizabeth, and forms one of the glories of her reign. 

* [Collins.] 

f [The fourth Eclogue alone is in print ; nor is a MS. copy of the wMlble 
known to exist.] 



190 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



SAMUEL ROWLANDS. 

[Died, 1634 ?] 

The history of this author is quite unknown, except that he was 
a prolific pamphleteer in the reigns of Elizabeth, James L, and 
Charles I. Ritson has mustered a numerous catalogue of his 
works, to which the compilers of the ' Censura Literaria' have 
added some articles. It has been remarked by the latter, that 
his Muse is generally found in low company, from which it is 
inferred that he frequented the haunts of dissipation. The con- 
clusion is unjust — Fielding was not a blackguard, though he 
wTote the adventures of Jonathan TVild. His descriptions of 
contemporary follies have considerable humour. I think he has 
afforded in the story of Smug the Smith a hint to Butler for his 
apologue of vicarious justice, in the case of the brethren who 
hanged a " poor weaver that was bed-rid," instead of the cobbler 
who had killed an Indian, 

" Not out of malice, but mere zeal, 
Because he was au Infidel." 

Hudihras, Part ii. Canto ii. 1. 420. 



JOHN DONNE, D.D. 

[Bom, 1573. Died, 1631.] 

The life of Donne is more interesting than his poetr}\ He was 
descended from an ancient family ; his mother was related to Sir 
Thomas More, and to Hey wood the epigrammatist. A prodigy 
of youthful learning, he was entered of Hart Hall, now Hertford 
College, at the unprecedented age of eleven : he studied after- 
wards with an extraordinary thirst for general knowledge, and 
seems to have consumed a considerable patrimony on his educa- 
tion and travels. Having accompanied the Earl of Essex in his 
expedition to Cadiz, he purposed to have set out on an extensive 
course of travels, and to have visited the holy sepulchre at Jeru- 
salem. Though compelled to give up his design by the insuper- 
able dangers and difficulties of the journey, he did not come 



ROWLANDS-DONNE. 191 

home till his mind had been stored with an extensive knowledge 
of foreign languages and manners, by a residence in the south of 
Europe. On his return to England, the Lord Chancellor Elles- 
mere made him his secretary, and took him to his house. There 
he formed a mutual attachment to the niece of Lady Ellesmere, 
and, without the means or prospect of support, the lovers thought 
proper to marry. The lady's father, Sir George More, on the 
declaration of this step, was so transported with rage, that he 
insisted on the chancellor's driving Donne from his protection, 
and even got him imprisoned, together with the witnesses of the 
marriage. He was soon released from prison, but the chancellor 
would not again take him into his service, and the brutal father- 
in-law would not support the unfortunate pair. In their distress, 
however, they were sheltered by Sir Francis Wolley, a son of 
Lady Ellesmere by a former marriage, with whom they resided 
for several years, and were treated with a kindness that mitigated 
their sense of dependence. 

Donne had been bred a Catholic, but on mature reflection had 
made a conscientious renunciation of that faith. One of his 
warm friends. Dr. Morton, afterwards Bishop of Durham, wished 
to have provided for him, by generously surrendering one of his 
benefices : he therefore pressed him to take holy orders, and to 
return to him the third day with his answer to the proposal. 
" At hearing of this" (says his biographer), " Mr. Donne's 
faint breath and perplexed countenance gave visible testimony 
of an inward conflict. He did not however return his answer 
till the third day ; when, with fervid thanks, he declined the 
offer, telling the bishop that there were some errors of his life 
which, though long repented of, and pardoned, as he trusted, by 
God, might yet be not forgotten by some men, and which might 
cast a dishonour on the sacred office." We are not told what 
those irregularities were ; but the conscience which could dictate 
such an answer was not likely to require great offences for a 
stumblingblock. This occurred in the poet's thirty-fourth year. 

After the death of Sir F. Wolley, his next protector was Sir 
Robert Drury, whom he accompanied on an embassy to France. 
His wife, with an attachment as romantic as poet could wish for, 
had formed the design of accompanying him as a page. It was 
on this occasion, and to dissuade her from the design, that he 



192 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

addressed to her the verses beginning, " By our first strange and 
fatal interview." Isaak Walton relates, with great simplicity, 
how the poet, one evening, as he sat alone in his chamber in 
Paris, saw the vision of his beloved wife appear to him with a 
dead infant in her arras, a story which wants only credibility to 
be interesting. He had at last the good fortune to attract the 
regard of King James ; and, at his Majesty's instance, as he 
might now consider that he had outlived the remembrance of 
his former follies, he was persuaded to become a clergyman. 
In this capacity he was successively appointed chaplain to the 
king, lecturer of Lincoln's Inn, vicar of St. Dunstan's Fleet 
street, and dean of St. Paul's. His death, at a late age, was 
occasioned by consumption. He was buried in St. Paul's, wh»e 
his figure yet remains in the vault of St. Faith's, carved from a 
painting for which he sat a few days before his death, dressed in 
his winding-sheet. 



THOMAS PICKE. 

Of this author I have been able to obtain no further information 
than that he b' longed to the Inner Temple, and translated a 
great number of John Owen's Latin epigrams into English. 
His songs, sonnets, and elegies bear the date of 1631. Indif- 
ferent as the collection is, entire pieces of it are pilfered. 



GEORGE HERBERT. 

[Bom, 1593. Died, 1632-3.] 

" Holy George Herbert," as he is generally called, was preben- 
dary of Leighton Ecclesia, a village in Huntingdonshire. Thougl 
Bacon is said to have consulted him about some of his writings, 
his memory is chiefly indebted to the affectionate mention of old 
Isaak "Walton. 



PICKE— HERBERT— MARSTON. 193 

JOHN MARSTON. 

[Died, 1634.] 

This writer was the antagonist of Jonson in the drama, and the 
rival of Bishop Hall in satire,* though confessedly inferior to 
them both in their respective walks of poetry. While none of 
his biographers seem to know anything about him, Mr. Gifford 
(in his ' Memoirs of Ben Jonson') conceives that Wood has uncon- 
sciously noticed him as a gentlemen of Coventry, who married 
Mary, the daughter of the Rev. W. Wilkes, chaplain to King 
James, and rector of St. Martin, in Wiltshire. According to 
this notice, our poet died at London in 1634, and was buried in 
the church belonging to the Temple. These particulars agree 
with what Jonson said to Drummond respecting this dramatic 
opponent of his, in his conversation at Hawthornden, viz. that 
Marston wrote his father-in-law's preachings, and his father- 
in-law Marston's comedies. Marston's comedies are somewhat 
dull ; and it is not difficult to conceive a witty sermon of those 
days, when puns were scattered from the pulpit, to have been as 
lively as an indiiferent comedy. Marston is the Crispinus of 
Jonson's * Poetaster,' where he is treated somewhat less contemp- 
tuously that his companion Demetrius (Dekker) ; an allusion is 
even made to the respectability of his birth. Both he and Dekker 
were afterwards reconciled to Jonson ; but Marston's reconcile- 
ment, though he dedicated his ' Malcontent ' to his propitiated 
enemy, seems to have been subject to relapses. It is amusing to 
find Langbaine descanting on the chaste purity of Marston as a 
writer, and the author of the ' Biographia Dramatica ' transcribing 
the compliment immediately before the enumeration of his plays, 
which are stuffed with obscenity. To this disgraceful character- 
istic of Marston an allusion is made in ' The Return from Par- 
nassus,' where it is said, 

" Give him plain naked words stripp'd from their shirts, 
That might beseem plain-dealing Aretine." 



* He wrote ' The Scourge of Villany,' three books of satires, 1599. He 
was also author of ' The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image,' and certain 
Satires, published 1598, which makes his date as satirist nearly coeval with 
that of Bishop Hall. 

O 



194 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

GEORGE CHAPMAN. 

[Born, 1557. Died, 1634.] 

George Chapman was born at Hitching-hill,* in the county of 
Hertford, and studied at Oxford. From thence he repaired to 
London, and became the friend of Shakspeare, Spenser, Daniel, 
Marlowe, and other contemporary men of genius. He was pa- 
tronised by Prince Henry, and Carr Earl of Somerset. The 
death of the one, and the disgrace of the- other, must have injured 
his prospects ; but he is supposed to have had some place at court, 
either under King James or his consort Anne. He lived to an 
advanced age ; and, according to Wood, was a person of reve- 
rend aspect, religious, and temperate. Inigo Jones, with whom 
he lived on terms of intimate friendship, planned and erected a 
monument to his memory over his burial-place, on the south 
side of St. Giles's church in the fields ; but it was unfortunately 
destroyed with the ancient church. f 

Chapman seems to have been a favourite of his own times ; 
and in a subsequent age his version of Homer excited the rap- 
tures of "Waller, and was diligently consulted by Pope. The 
latter speaks of its daring fire, though he owns that it is clouded 
by fustian. Webster, his fellow-dramatist, praises his " full and 
heightened style," a character which he does not deserve in any 
favourable sense ; for his diction is chiefly marked by barbarous 
ruggedness, false elevation, and extravagant metaphor. The 
drama owes him very little ; his ' Bussy d'Ambois * is a piece of 
frigid atrocity, and in 'The Widow's Tears,' where his heroine . 
Cynthia falls in love with a sentinel guarding the corpse of her 
husband, whom she was bitterly lamenting, he has dramatised 
one of the most puerile and disgusting legends ever fabricated f 
for the disparagement of female constancy.;): 

* William Browne, the pastoral poet, calls him " the learned shepherd of 
fair Hitching-hill." 

t [This is a mistake. It is still to be seen against the exterior south wall r 
of the church.] 

X [" Chapman would have made a great epic poet, if indeed he has not 
abundantly shown himself to be one ; for his Homer is not so properly a 
translation as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses re- written.'' — Charle- 
Lamb.] 



CHAPMAN— RANDOLPH. 195 



THOMAS RANDOLPH. 

[Born, 1605. Died, 1634.] 

Thomas Randolph was the son of a steward to Lord Zouch. 
He was a king's scholar at Westminster, and obtained a fellow- 
ship at Cambridge. His wit and learning endeared him to Ben 
Jonson, who owned him like Cartwright as his adopted son in 
the Muses. Unhappily he followed the taste of Ben not only at 
the pen but at the bottle, and he closed his life in poverty at the 
age of twenty-nine, — a date lamentably premature when we 
consider the promises of his genius. His wit and humour are 
very conspicuous in the Puritan characters, whom he supposes 
the spectators of his scenes in * The Muses' Looking-Glass.' 
Throughout the rest of that drama (though it is on the whole 
his best performance) he unfortunately prescribed to himself too 
hard and confined a system of dramatic effect. Professing simply, 

" in single scenes to show, 
How comedy presents each single vice. 
Ridiculous — " 

he introduces the vices and contrasted humours of human nature 
in a tissue of unconnected personifications, and even refines his 
representations of abstract character into conflicts of speculative 
opinion. 

For his skill in this philosophical pageantry the poet speaks of 
being indebted to Aristotle, and probably thought of his play 
what Voltaire said of one of his own, " This would please you, 
if you were Greeks.'*^ The female critic's reply to Voltaire was 
very reasonable, " But we are not Greeks. ^^ Judging of Ran- 
dolph however by the plan which he professed to follow, his 
execution is vigorous : his ideal characters are at once distinct 
and various, and compact with the expression which he purposes 
to give them. He was author of five other dramatic pieces, 
besides miscellaneous poems.* 

He died at the house of his friend, W. Stafford, Esq. of Bla- 

* 1. Aristippus, or the Jovial Philosopher.— 2. The Conceited Pedler. — 
3. The Jealous Lovers, a comedy. — 4. Amyntas, or the Impossible Dowry, 
a pastoral. — 5. Hey for Honesty, Down with Knavery, a comedy. 

o 2 



196 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

therwyke, in his native county, and was buried in the adjacent 
church, where an appropriate monument was erected to him by 
Sir Christopher (afterwards Lord) Hatton. 



RICHARD CORBET. 

[Born, 1582. Died, 1635.J 

The anecdotes of this facetious bishop, quoted by Headley from 
the Aubrey MSS., would fill several pages of a jest-book. It is 
more to his honour to be told, that though entirely hostile in his 
principles to the Puritans, he frequently softened, with his humane 
and characteristic pleasantry, the furious orders against them 
which Laud enjoined him to execute. On the whole he does 
credit to the literary patronage of James, who made him Dean of 
Christ Church, and successively Bishop of Oxford and Norwich. 



THOMAS MIDDLETON. 

[Born, 1 570. Buried, 4th July, 1627.] 

The dates of this author's birth and death are both unknown, 
though his living reputation, as the literary associate of Jonson, 
Fletcher, Massinger, Dekker, and Rowley, must have been con- 
siderable. If Oldys be correct,* he was alive after November j 
1627. Middleton was appointed chronologer to the city of 
Londont in 1620, and in 1624 was cited before the privy council, 
iis author of ' The Game of Chess.' The verses of Sir W. Lower, 
quoted by Oldys, allude to the poet's white locks, so that he was 
probably born as early as the middle of the 16th century.;}: His 
tragicomedy, * The Witch/ according to Mr. Malone, was 
written anterior to ' Macbeth,' and suggested to Shakspeare the 

* MS. notes on Langbaine. [He was buried at Newington Butts, near 
London, on the 4th of July, 1627. — Dyce's Middleton, xo\. i. p. xxxviii.] 

t [Or city poet. Jonson and Quarles filled the office after Middleton, 
which expired with Elkanah Settle in 1723-4.] 

I [The verses in question I believe to be a forgery of Chetwood. — Dyce's 
Middletoiiy vol. i. p. xiii.] 



CORBET— MIDDLETON—NICCOLS—FITZGEFFEEY. 1 9 7 

■witchcraft scenery in the latter play. The songs beginning 
" Come away," &c., and " Black Spirits," &c., of which only the 
two first words are printed in * Macbeth,' are found in ' The Witch/ 
Independent of having afforded a hint to Shakspeare, Middleton's 
reputation cannot be rated highly for the pieces to which his 
name is exclusively attached. His principal efforts were in 
coniedy, where he deals profusely in grossness and buffoonery. 
The cheats and debaucheries of the town are his favourite sources 
of comic intrigue. With a singular effort at the union of the 
sublime and familiar, he introduces, in one of his course drafts 
of London vice, an infernal spirit prompting a country gentleman 
to the seduction of a citizen's wife. 



RICHARD NICCOLS. 

[Born, 1584.] 

The plan of ' The Mirror for Magistrates,' begun by Ferrers and 
Sackville, was followed up by Churchyard, Phaer, Higgins, 
Drayton, and many others. The last contributor of any note was 
Niccols in 1610, in his 'Winter Night's Vision.' Niccols was 
the author of 'TheCuckow' [1607,] written in imitation of 
Drayton's ' Owl,' and several poems of temporary popularity, 
and of a drama entitled ' The Twynne's Tragedy.' He was a 
Londoner, and, having studied (says Wood) at Oxford, obtained 
some employment worthy of his faculties ; but of what kind, we 
are left to conjecture. 



CHARLES FITZGEFFREY. 

[Died, 1636.] 

Charles Fitzgeffrey was rector of the parish of St. Dominic, 
in Cornwall. 



198 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



BEN JONSON. 

[Born, 1574. Died, 1637.] 

Till Mr. Gilchrist and Mr. Gifford stood forward in defence of 
this poet's memory, it had become an established article of literary 
faith that his personal character was a compound of spleen, sur- 
liness, and ingratitude. The proofs of this have been weighed 
and found wanting. It is true that he had lofty notions of him- 
self, was proud even to arrogance in his defiance of censure, and 
in the warmth of his own praises of himself was scarcely sur- 
passed by his most zealous admirers ; but many fine traits of 
honour and aflTection are likewise observable in the portrait of 
his character, and the charges of malice and jealousy that have 
been heaped on his name for an hundred years turn out to be 
without foundation. In the quarrel with Marston and Dekker 
his culpability is by no means evident. He did not receive 
benefits from Shakspeare, and did not sneer at him in the pas- 
sages that have been taken to prove his ingratitude ; and instead 
of envying that great poet, he gave him his noblest praise ; nor 
did he trample on his contemporaries, but liberally commended 
them.* With regard to Inigo Jones, with whom he quarrelled, 
it appears to have been Joiison's intention to have consigned 
his satires on that eminent man to oblivion ; but their enmit}^, 
as his editor has shown, began upon the part of the architect, 
who, when the poet was poor and bedridden, meanly resented 
the fancied affront of Jonson's name being put before his own to 
a masque which they had jointly prepared, and used his influence 
to do him an injury at court.f As to Jonson's envying Shak- 
speare, men otherwise candid and laborious in the search of truth 
seem to have had the curse of the Philistines imposed on their 

* The names of Shakspeare, Drayton, Donne, Chapman, Fletcher, Beau- 
mont, May, and Browne, which almost exhaust the poetical catalogue of the 
time, are the separate and distinct subjects of his praise. His unkindness to 
Daniel seems to be the only exception. 

t [Their enmity began in the very early part of their connexion ; for in 
the complete copy of Drummond's Notes there are several allusions to this 
hostility. Inigo had the best retaliation in life — but Jonsou has it now, and 
for ever.] 



BEN JONSON. 199 



understandings and charities the moment they approached the 
subject. The fame of Shakspeare himself became an heirloom 
of traditionary- calumnies against the memory of Jonson ; the 
fancied relics of his envy were regarded as so many pious do- 
nations at the shrine of the greater poet, whose admirers 
thought they could not dig too deeply for trophies of his glory 
among the ruins of his imaginary rival's reputation. If such 
inquirers as Reed and Malone went wrong upon this subject, it 
is too severe to blame the herd of literary labourers for plodding 
in their footsteps ; but it must excite regret as well as wonder 
that a man of pre-eminent living genius* should have been one 

of those 

" quos de tramite recto 
Impia sacrilegce flexit contagio iurbce," 

and should have gravely drawn down Jonson to a parallel with 
Shadwell for their common traits of low society, vulgar dialect, 
and intemperance. Jonson's low society comprehended such 
men as Selden, Camden, and Gary ; Shadwell (if we may trust 
to Rochester's account of him) was probably rather profligate 
than vulgar ; while either of Jonson's vulgarity or indecency in 
his recorded conversations there is not a trace. But they both 
wore great-coats — Jonson drank canary, and Shadwell swallowed 
opium. " There is a river in Macedon, and there is, moreover, 
a river at 3Ionmouth" 

The grandfather of Ben Jonson was originally of Annandale, 
in Scotland, from whence he removed to Carlisle, and was sub- 
sequently in the service of Henry VIII. The poet's father, who 
lost his estate under the persecution of Queen Mary, and was 
afterwards a preacher, died a month before Benjamin's birth, 
and his widow married a master bricklayer of the name of 
Fowler.j Benjamin through the kindness of a friend was edu- 
cated at Westminster, and obtained an exhibition to Cambridge ; 
but it proved insufficient for his support. He therefore returned 
from the university to his father-in-law's house and liumble occu- 
pation ; but disliking the latter, as may be well conceived, he 



F? * [Sir Walter Scott. See Gifford's ' Ben Jonson,' vol. i. p. clxxxi., and 
Scott's replies in Misc. Prose Works, vol. i. p. 227, and vol. vii. p. 374- 
382.] 

t [This is a mistake. The name of her second husband is still unknown. 
See Collier's ' Life of Shakspeare,' p. clxvi.] 



200 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

repaired as a volunteer to the army in Flanders, and in the cam- 
paign which he served there distinguished himself, though yet a 
stripling, by killing an enemy in single combat in the presence 
of both armies. From thence he came back to England, and 
betook himself to the stage for support ; at first probably as an 
actor, though undoubtedly very early as a writer. At this period 
he was engaged in a second single combat, which threatened to 
terminate more disastrously than the former ; for, having been 
challenged by some player* to fight a duel with the sword, he 
killed his adversary indeed, but was severely wounded in the 
encounter, and thrown into prison for murder. There the as- 
siduities of a Catholic priest made him a convert to popery, and 
the miseries of a gaol were increased to him by the visitation of 
spies, sent no doubt in consequence of his change to a faith 
of which the bare name was at that time nearly synonymous with 
the suspicion of treason. He was liberated, however, after a 
short imprisonment, without a trial. At the distance of twelve 
years he was restored to the bosom of his mother church. Soon 
after his release he thought proper to marrj^, although his cir- 
cumstances were far from promising, and he was only in his 
twentieth year. In his two-and-twentieth year he rose to con- 
siderable popularity by the comedy of ' Every Man in his 
Humour,' which two years after became a still higher favourite 
with the public, when the scene and names were shifted from 
Italy to England, in order to suit the manners of the piece, 
which had all along been native. It is at this renovated appear- 
ance of his play (1598) that his fancied obligations to Shakspeare 
for drawing him out of obscurity have been dated ; but it is at 
this time that he is pointed out by Meres as one of the most 
distinguished writers of the age. 

The fame of his ' Every Man out of his Humour ' drew Queen 
Elizabeth to its representation, whose early encouragement of 
his genius is commemorated by Lord Falkland. It was a fame, 
however, which, according to his own account, had already ex- 
posed him to envy — Marston and Dekker did him this homage. 
He lashed them in his ' Cynthia's Revels,' and anticipated their 
revenge in * The- Poetaster.' Jonson's superiority in the contest 

* [Gabriel Spenser. See Collier's ' Life of Alleyn,' p. 51, and Collier's 
Memoirs of Actors,' p. xx.— both printed for the Shakspeare Society.] 



BEN JONSON. 201 



can scarcely be questioned ; but ' The Poetaster' drew down other 
enemies on its author than those with whom he was at war. His 
satire alluded to the follies of soldiers and the faults of lawyers. 
The former were easily pacified, but the lawyers adhered to him 
with their wonted tenacity, and it became necessary for the poet 
to clear himself before the lord chief justice. In our own days 
the fretfulness of resenting professional derision has been deemed 
unbecoming even the magnanimity of tailors. 

Another proof of the slavish subjection of the stage in those 
times is to be found soon after the accession of King James, 
when the authors of ' Eastward Hoe ' were committed to prison 
for some satirical reflections on the Scotch nation which that 
comedy contained. Only Marston and Chapman, who had 
framed the offensive passages, were seized ; but Jonson, who had 
taken a share in some other part of the composition, conceived 
himself bound in honour to participate their fate, and voluntarily 
accompanied them to prison. It was on this occasion that his 
mother, deceived by the rumour of a barbarous punishment being 
intended for her son, prepared a lusty poison, which she meant 
to have given him and to have drunk along with him. This was 
maintaining in earnest the consanguinity of heroism and genius. 

The imagined insult to the sovereign being appeased, James's 
accession proved altogether a fortunate epoch in Jonson's his- 
tory. A peaceable reign gave encouragement to the arts and 
festivities of peace ; and in those festivities, not yet degraded to 
mere sound and show. Poetry still maintained the honours of her 
primogeniture among the arts. Jonson was therefore congenially 
employed and liberally rewarded in the preparation of those 
masques for the court which filled up the intervals of his more 
properly dramatic labours, and which allowed him room for 
classical impersonations and lyrical trances of fancy that would 
not have suited the business of the ordinary stage. The recep- 
tion of his ' Sejanus,' in 1603, was at first unfavourable ; but it 
was remodelled and again presented with better success, and kept 
possession of the theatre for a considerable time. Whatever this 
tragedy may want in the agitating power of poetry, it has a 
strength and dramatic skill that might have secured it at least 
from the petulant contempt with which it has been too often 
spoken of. Though collected from the dead languages, it is not 



202 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

a lifeless mass of antiquity, but the work of a severe and strong 
imagination, compelling shapes of truth and consistency to rise 
in dramatic order from the fragments of Roman eloquence and 
history ; and an air not only of life but of grandeur is given to 
those curiously adjusted materials. The arraignment of Caius 
Silius before Tiberius is a great and poetical cartoon of Roman 
characters; and if Jonson has translated from Tacitus, who 
would not tliank him for embodying the pathos of history in such 
lines as these, descriptive of Germanicus ? — 

" O that man ! 
If there were seeds of the old virtue left, 
They lived in him. * * 

***** 

What his funerals lack'd 
In images and pomp, they had supplied 
With honourable sorrow. Soldiers' sadness, 
A kind of silent mourning, such as men 
Who know no tears, but from their captives, use 
To show in so great losses." 

By his three succeeding plays, ' Volpone ' (in 1605), * The 
Silent Woman' (in 1609), and 'The Alchemist' (in 1610), 
Jonson's reputation in the comic drama rose to a pitch which 
neither his own nor any other pen could well be expected to sur- 
pass. The tragedy of 'Catiline' appeared in 1611, prefaced by 
an address to the Ordinary Reader as remarkable for the strength 
of its style as for the contempt of popular judgments which it 
breathes. Such an appeal from ordinary to extraordinary readers 
ought at least to have been made without insolence, as the dif- 
ference between the few and the many in matters of criticism lies 
more in the power of explaining their sources of pleasure than 
in enjoying them. ' Catiline,' it is true, from its classical sources, 
was chiefly to be judged of by classical readers ; but its author 
should have still remembered that popular feeling is the great 
basis of dramatic fame. Jonson lived to alter his tone to the 
public, and the lateness of his humility must have made it more 
mortifying. The haughty preface, however, disappeared from 
later editions of the play, while its better apolog)' remained in 
the high delineation of Cicero's character, and in passages of 
Roman eloquence which it contains ; above all in the concluding 
speech of Petreius. It is said, on Lord Dorset's authority, to 
have been Jonson's favourite production. 



BEN JONSON. 203 



In 1613 he made a short trip to the Continent, and, being in 
Paris, was introduced to the Cardinal du Perron, who, in com- 
pliment to his learning, showed him his translation of Virgil. 
Ben, according to Drummond's anecdotes, told the cardinal that 
it was nought ; a criticism by all accounts as just as it was brief. 

Of his two next pieces, 'Bartholomew Fair' (in 1614), and 
* The Devil is an Ass ' (in 1616), the former was scarcely a 
decline from the zenith of his comic excellence, the latter cer- 
tainly was : if it was meant to ridicule superstition, it effected its 
object by a singular process of introducing a devil upon the 
stage. After this he made a long secession of nine years from 
the theatre, during which he composed some of his finest masques 
for the court, and some of those works which were irrecoverably 
lost in the fire that consumed his study. Meanwhile he received 
from his sovereign a pension of 100 marks, which in courtesy 
has been called making him poet laureat. The title, till then 
gratuitously assumed, has been since appropriated to his suc- 
cessors in the pension. 

The poet's journey to Scotland (1619) awakens many pleasing 
recollections when we conceive him anticipating his welcome 
among a people who might be proud of a share in his ancestry, 
and setting out with manly strength on a journey of 400 miles 
on foot. We are assured by one who saw him in Scotland that 
he was treated with respect and affection among the nobility and 
gentry ; nor was the romantic scenery of Scotland lost upon his 
fancy. From the poem which he meditated on Lochlomond it 
is seen that he looked on it with a poet's eye. But, unhappily, 
the meagre anecdotes of Drummond have made this event of his 
life too prominent by the over-importance which has been 
attached to them. Drummond, a smooth and sober gentleman, 
seems to have disliked Jonson's indulgence in that conviviality 
which Ben had shared with his Fletcher and Shakspeare at the 
Mermaid. In consequence of those anecdotes Jonson's memory 
has been damned for brutality, and Drummond's for perfidy. 
Jonson drank freely at Hawthornden, and talked big — things 
neither incredible nor unpardonable. Drummond's perfidy 
amounted to writing a letter beginning " Sir," with one very 
kind sentence in it, to the man whom he had described unfa- 
vourably in a private memorandum which he never meant for 



204 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

publication. As to Drummond's decoying Jonson under his 
roof with any premeditated design on his reputation, no one can 
seriously believe it.* 

By the continued kindness of King James our poet was some 
years after [September 1621] presented with the reversionary grant 
of the mastership of the revels, but from which he derived no 
advantage, as the incumbent, Sir John Astley, survived him. 
It fell, however, to the poet's son, by the permission of Charles Lf 
King James, in the contemplation of his laureat's speedy acces- 
sion to this office, was desirous of conferring on him the rank of 
knighthood ; but Jonson was unwilling to accept the distinction, 
and prevailed on some of his friends about the court to dissuade 
the monarch from his purpose. After the death of his patron 
James, necessity brought him again upon the theatre, and he 
produced * The Staple of News,' a comedy of no ordinary merit. 
Two evils were at this time rapidly gaining on him — 

" Disease and poverty, fell pair." 

He was attacked by the palsy in 1625, and had also a tendency 
to dropsy, together with a scorbutic affection inherent from his 
youth, which pressed upon the decaying powers of his consti- 
tution. From the first stroke of the palsy he gradually recovered 
so far as to be able to write in the following year the anti- 
masque of ' Sophiel.' For the three succeeding years his bio- 
grapher suspects that the court had ceased to call upon him for 
his customary contributions, a circumstance which must have 
aggravated his poverty ; and his salary it appears was irregularly 
paid. Meanwhile his infirmities increased, and he was unable to 
leave his room. In these circumstances he produced his * New 
Inn,' a comedy that was driven from the stage with violent hos- 
tility. The epilogue to this piece forms a melancholy contrast 

* [" The furious invective of Gifford against Drummond for having written 
private memoranda of his conversations with Ben Jonson, which he did 
not publish, and which, for aught we know, were perfectly faithful, is 
absurd. Any one else would have been thankful for so much literary 
anecdote.' — Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. iii. p. 505.] 

f [This is not quite correct : the son died in 1635, Jonson in 1637, and 
Astley a year or so after. Astley thus survived the father, to whom the 
reversion had been granted, and the son, to whom the transfer had been 
made. See Gifford, p. cxliv., and Collier's ' Annals," vol. ii. p. 89. Sir Henry 
Herbert was Astley's successor.] 



BEN JONSON. 205 



to the tone of his former addresses to the audience. He " whom 
the morning saw so great and high "* was now so humble as to 
speak of his " faint and faltering tongue," and of his " brain set 
round with pain." An allusion to the king and queen in the 
same epilogue awoke the slumbering kindness of Charles, who 
instantly sent him 100/., and, in compliance with the poet's re- 
quest, also converted the 100 marks of his salary into pounds, 
and added of his own accord a yearly tierce of canary, Jonson's 
favourite wine. His Majesty's injunctions for the preparation of 
masques for the court were also renewed till they were discon- 
tinued at the suggestion of Inigo Jones, who preferred the 
assistance of one Aurelian Townsend to that of Jonson in the 
furnishing of those entertainments. His means of subsistence 
were now perhaps both precariously supplied and imprudently 
expended. The city in 1631, from whom he had always re- 
ceived a yearly allowance of 100 nobles by way of securing his 
assistance in their pageants, withdrew their pension. f He was 
compelled by poverty to supplicate the Lord Treasurer Weston 
for relief. On the rumour of his necessities assistance came to 
him from various quarters, and from none more liberally than 
from the Earl of Newcastle. On these and other timely bounties 
his sickly existence was propped up to accomplish two more 
comedies, * The Magnetic Lady,' which appeared in 1632, and 
' The Tale of a Tub,' which came out in the following year. In 
the last of these, the last indeed of his dramatic career, he en- 
deavoured to introduce some ridicule on Inigo Jones through 
the machinery of a puppet-show. Jones had distinguished him- 
self at the representation of ' The Magnetic Lady ' by his bois- 
terous derision. The attempt at retaliation was more natural 
than dignified ; but the court prevented it, and witnessed the re- 
presentation of the play at Whitehall with coldness. Whatever 
humour its manners contain was such as courtiers were not 
likely to understand. 

In the spring of 1633 Charles visited Scotland, and on the 

* Sejanus. 

f ['' Yesterday the barbarous court of aldermen have -withdra-wn 
their chandlerly pension for verjuice and mustard, 33Z. 6s. 8d." — Jonson 
to the Earl of Newcastle, 20th December 1631. It was, however, soon 
restored.] 



206 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

road was entertained by the Earl of Newcastle with all the 
luxury and pageantry of loyal hospitality. To grace the enter- 
tainment Jonson sent, in grateful obedience to liis benefactor the 
earl, a little interlude, entitled ' Love's Welcome at Welbeck,' 
and another of the same kind for the king and queen's reception 
at Bolsover. In despatching the former of these to his noble 
patron the poet alludes to his past bounties, which had " fallen 
like the dew of heaven on his necessities." 

In his unfinished pastoral drama of ' The Sad Shepherd,' his 
biographer traces one bright and sunny ray that broke through 
the gloom of his setting days. Amongst his papers were found 
the plot and opening of a domestic tragedy on the story of 
Mortimer Earl of March, together with ' The Discoveries ' and 
* Grammar of the English Tongue ;' works containing no doubt 
the philological and critical reflections of more vigorous yerurs, 
but which it is probable that he must have continued to write 
till he was near his dissolution. That event took place on the 
6th of August, 1637. 



THOMAS CAREW. 

[Bom, 1589. Died, 1639.] 

"When Mr. Ellis pronounced that Carew certainly died in 1634, 
he had probably some reasons for setting aside the date of the 
poet's birth assigned by Lord Clarendon ; but as he has not given 
them, the authority of a contemporary^ must be allowed to stand. 
He was of the Carews of Gloucestershire, a family descended from 
the elder stock of that name in Devonshire, and a younger brother 
of Sir Matthew Carew, who was a zealous adherent of the fortunes 
of Charles I. He was educated at Oxford, but was neither matri- 
culated nor took any degree. After returning from his travels, 
he was received with distinction at the court of Charles I. for his 
elegant manners and accomplishments, and was appointed gentle- 
man of the privy chamber, and sewer in ordinary to his Majesty. 
The rest of his days seem to have passed in aflfluence and ease, 
and he died just in time to save him from witnessing the gay and 
gallant court, to which he had contributed more than the ordinary 



CAREW— WOTTON. 207 



literature of a courtier, dispersed by the storm of civil war that 
was already gathering.* 

The want of boldness and expansion in Carew's thoughts and 
subjects excludes him from rivalship with great poetical names ; 
nor is it difficult, even within the narrow pale of his works, to 
discover some faults of affectation, and of still more objectionable 
indelicacy. But among the poets who have walked in the same 
limited path he is pre-eminently beautiful, and deservedly ranks 
among the earliest of those who gave a cultivated grace to our 
lyrical strains. His slowness in composition was evidently that 
sort of care in the poet which saves trouble to his reader. His 
poems have touches of elegance and refinement, which their 
trifling subjects could not have yielded without a delicate and 
deliberate exercise of the fancy; and he unites the point and 
polish of later times with many of the genial and warm tints of 
the elder Muse. Like Waller, he is by no means free from con- 
ceit ; and one regrets to find him addressing the Surgeon bleeding 
Celia, in order to tell him that the blood which he draws proceeds 
not from the fair one's arm, but from the lover's heart. But of 
such frigid thoughts he is more sparing than Waller; and his 
conceptions, compared to that poet's, are like fruits of a richer 
flavour, that have been cultured with the same assiduity. 



SIR HENRY WOTTON. 

[Born, 1568. Died, 1639.] 

Sir Henry Wotton was born at Bocton-Malherbe, in Kent. 
Foreseeing the fall of the Earl of Essex, to whom he was secre- 
tary, he left the kingdom, but returned upon the accession of 
James, and was appointed ambassador to the court of Venice. 
Towards the close of his life he took deacon's orders, and was 
nominated provost of Eton."f 

* [He is mentioned as alive in 1638 in Lord Falkland's verses on Jonson's 
death ; and as there is no poem by Carew in the ' Jonsonus Virbius,' it is 
not unlikely that he was dead before its publication.] 

t " [Sir Henry Wotton's verses of ' A Happie Lyfe ' he hath by heart." 
Ben JojisorCs Convemations with Drummond, edition Laing, p. viii.] 



208 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

WILLIAM ALEXANDER, EARL OF STERLINE. 

[Bom, 1580. Died, 1640.] 

William Alexander, of Menstrie, travelled on the continent 
as tutor to the Earl of Argjdl ; and after his return to his native 
country (Scotland), having in vain solicited a mistress, whom he 
celebrates in his poetry by the name of Aurora, he married the 
daughter of Sir Walter Erskine. Having repaired to the court 
of James L, he obtained the notice of the monarch, was appointed 
gentleman usher to Prince Charles', and was knighted by James. 
Both of those sovereigns patronized his scheme for colonizing 
Nova Scotia, of which the latter made him lord-lieutenant. 
Charles I. created him Earl of Sterline in 1633, and for ten 
years he held the office of secretary of state for Scotland, with 
the praise of moderation, in times that were rendered peculiarly 
trying by the struggles of Laud against the Scottish Presbyterians. 
He wrote some very heavy tragedies ; but there is elegance of 
expression in a few of his shorter pieces.* 



NATHANIEL FIELD. 

[Born, 1587. Died, 1632-3.] 

Nathaniel Field had the honour of being connected with 
Massinger in * The Fatal Dowry,' the play from which Rowe 
stole the plot of his ' Fair Penitent.' f 

* [" Lord Sterline is rather monotonous, as sonnetteers usually are, and 
be addresses his mistress by the appellation of ' Fair tygress.' Campbell 
observes that there is elegance of expression in a few of his shorter pieces.' 
— Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. iii. p. 505.] 

f [For the fullest particulars about Nathaniel Field (many entirely new), 
see Mr. Collier's Life of Field in his ' Memoirs of the Principal Actors 
in the Plays of Shakspeare,' 8vo. 18-46.] 



ALEXANDER— FIELD— DEKKER. 209 



THOMAS DEKKER. 

[Died about 1638.] 

At the close of the sixteenth century we find that the theatres, 
conducted by Henslowe and Alleyn, chiefly depended on Jonson, 
Heywood, Chettle, and this poet, for composing or retouching 
their pieces. Marston and Dekker had laboured frequently in 
conjunction with Jonson, when their well-known hostility with 
hira commenced. What grounds of offence Marston and Dekker 
alleged cannot now be told ; but Jonson affirms that, after the 
appearance of his comedy, * Every Man in his Humour,' they 
began to provoke him on every stage with their ^^ petulant styles,^^ 
as if they wished to single him out for their adversary. When 
Jonson's ^ Cynthia's Revels ' appeared, they appropriated the two 
characters of Hedon and Anaides to themselves, and were brood- 
ing over their revenge when ' The Poetaster ' came forth, in which 
Dekker was recognised as Demetrius. Either that his wrath 
made him more willing, or that he was chosen the champion of 
the offended host, for his rapid powers and popularity, he fur- 
nished the ' Satiromastix ;' not indeed a despicable reply to Jonson, 
but more full of rage than of ridicule. The little that is known 
of Dekker's history, independent of his quarrel with Jonson, is 
unfortunate. His talents were prolific, and not contemptible ; 
but he was goaded on by want to hasty productions, acquainted 
with spunging-houses, and an inmate of the King's Bench prison.* 
Oldys thinks that he was alive in 1638. 



* He was there at one time for three years, according to Oldys. No 

wonder poor Dekker could rise a degree above the level of his ordinary 

i genius in describing the blessings of Fortunatus's inexhaustible puree : he 

had probably felt but too keenly the force of what he expresses in the 

misanthropy of Ampedo : — 

" I 'm not enamour'd of this painted idol, 
This strumpet world ; for her most beauteous looks 
Are poison'd baits, hung upon golden hooks. 
When fools do swim in wealth, her Cynthian beams 
Will wantonly dance on the silver streams ; 
But when this squint-eyed age sees virtue poor, 
And by a little spark set shivering, 
Begging of all, relieved at no man's door, 
She smiles on her as the sun shines on fire, 
To kill that little heat." 

r 



210 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

JOHN WEBSTER. 

[Died about 1638.] 

Langbaine only informs us of this writer that he was clerk o£ i 
St. Andrew's parish, Holborn,* and esteemed by his contem-.*a 
poraries. He wrote in conjunction with Rowley, Dekker, and j^ 
Marston. Among the pieces entirely his own are ' The White • 
Devil, or Vittoria Corombona,' the tragedy of ' Appius and Vir- 
ginia,' ' The DeviPs Law Case,' and ' The Duchess of Malfi.' 
From the advertisement prefixed to ' Vittoria Corombona,' the 
piece seems not to have been successful in the representatioD.) 
The author says " that it wanted that which is the only grace 
and setting out of a tragedy, a full and understanding auditory." 
The auditory, it may be suspected, were not quite so much struck 
with the beauty of Webster's horrors as Mr. Lamb seems to have 
been, in writing the notes to his ' Specimens of our old Dramatic 
Poetry.' In the same preface Webster deprives himself of the 
only apology that could be offered for his absurdities as a dra- 
matist by acknowledging that he wrote slowly ; a circumstance 
in wliich he modestly compares himself to Euripides. In his 
tragedy of ' The Duchess of Malfi,' the duchess is married and ^ 
delivered of several children in the course of the five acts. 



JOHN FORD. 

[Born, 1586, Died, 1640?] 

It is painful to find the name of Ford a barren spot in our 
poetical biography, marked by nothing but a few dates and con-i 
jectures, chiefly drawn from his own dedications. He was born 
of a respectable family in Devonshire ; was bred to the law, and 
entered of the Middle Temple at the age of seventeen. At the 
age of twenty he published a poem, entitled ' Fame's Memorial,' 
in honour of the deceased Earl of Devonshire; and, from the 

♦ [" Gildon, I believe, was the first who asserted that our author was clerk. 
of St. Andrew's. I searched the registers of that church, but the name of: 
Webster did not occur in them ; and I examined the MSS. belonging to then 
Parish Clerks' Hall, in Wood-street, with as little success." — Dvce's Webstert 
vol. i. p. 1.] ' - 



WEBSTER— FORD-ROWLEY. 211 

idedication of that piece, it appears that he chiefly subsisted upon 
jhis professional labours, making poetry the solace of his leisure 
■hours. All his plays were published between the years 1629 and 
11639; but before the former period he had for some time been 
jknovvn as a dramatic writer, his works having been printed a 
jconsiderable time after their appearance on the stage ; and, 
according to the custom of the age, had been associated in 
jseveral works with other composers.* With Dekker he joined 
jin dramatizing a story which reflects more disgrace upon the age 
jthan all its genius could redeem, namely, the fate of Mother 
jSawyer, the Witch of Edmonton, an aged woman, who had been 
irecently the victim of legal and superstitious murder — 
" Nil adeo/oedum quod non exacta vetustas 
Ediderit.'''' 

The time of his death is unknown.^ 



WILLIAM ROWLEY. 

[Born 15— . Died, 1640?] 

|0f William Rowley nothing more is known than that he was a 
Iplayer by profession, and for several years at the head of the 
Prince's | company of comedians. Though his name is found in 
jone instance affixed to a piece conjointly with Shakspeare's, he is 
enerally classed only in the third rank of our dramatists. His 
/luse is evidently a plebeian nymph, and had not been educated 

* [* Honour Triumphant,' and ' A Line of Life,' two tracts by Ford, un- 
nown to the editors of his works, were reprinted by the Shakespeare Society 
tin 1843.] 

t I have declined obtruding on the reader some passages in Ford's plays 

which possess a superior power to a scene in 'The Lovers Melancholy,' be- 

leause ihej have been anticipated by Mr. Lamb in his * Dramatic Speci- 

\ bnens.' Even if this had not been the case, I should have felt reluctant to 

I ^ive a place to one dreadfully beautiful specimen of his affecting powers, 

I pn the tragedy of 'The Brother and Sister.' Better that poetry should cease, 

I, than have to do with such subjects. ' The Lover's Melancholy ' has much 

jof the grace and sweetness that distinguishes the genius of Ford. [" Mr. 

ICampbell speaks favourably of the poetic portion of this play ; he thinks, 

jand I fully agree with him, that it has much of the grace and sweetness 

(Which distinguish the genius of Ford. It has also somewhat more of the 

kprightliness, in the language of the secondary characters, than is commonly 

•Kbund in his plays."'— Gifford.] 

X [Prince Charles, afterwards Charles I. The play in which his name 
s printed conjointly with Shakspeare's is called ' The Birth of Merlin. 'j 

p2 



212 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

in the school of the Graces. His most tolerable production is 
* The New "Wonder, or a Woman never Vexed.' Its drafts of 
citizen life and manners have an air of reality and honest truth ; 
the situations and characters are forcible, and the sentiments 
earnest and unaffected. The author seems to move in the sphere 
of life which he imitates with no false fears about its dignity, 
and is not ashamed to exhibit his broken merchant hanging out 
the bag for charity among the debtors of a prison-house. 



PHILIP MASSINGER. 

[Bom, 1583. Died, 1640.] 
The father of this dramatic poet was attached to the family of 
Henry, the second Earl of Pembroke, and died in the service of 
that honourable house. The name of a servant carried with it 
no sense of degradation in those times, when the great lords and 
officers of the court numbered inferior nobles among their fol- 
lowers. On one occasion the poet's father was the bearer of 
letters from the Earl of Pembroke to Queen Elizabeth ; a cir- 
cumstance which has been justly observed to indicate that h€ 
could be no mean person, considering the punctilious respecl 
which Elizabeth exacted from her courtiers. 

Massinger was born at Salisbury,* or probably at TTilton, jc 
its neighbourhood, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke, in whose 
family he also appears to have been educated. That noblemar/ 
died in the poet's sixteenth year, who thus unfortunately losf 
whatever chance he ever had of his protecting kindness. Hi- 
father continued indeed in the service of the succeeding earl,"', 
who was an accomplished man, a votary of the Muses, and on< 
of the brightest ornaments of the courts of Elizabeth and Jam; 
but he withheld his patronage from a man of genius, who ha» 
claims to it, and would have done it honour, for reasons that liav« ! 
not been distinctly explained in the scanty and sorrowful histor 
of the poet. Mr. Gifford, dissatisfied with former reasons allege(, 
for this neglect, and convinced from the perusal of his writing 
that Massinger was a Catholic, conjectures that it may be attri 
buted to his having offended the earl by having apostatized whiL 

* [He was baptizedin St. Thomas's Church, Salisbury, 24th November, 1583. I 
t William, the third Earl of Pembroke. 



MASSINGER. 213 



! at the university to that obnoxious faith. He was entered as a 
commoner of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, in his eighteenth year, 
where he continued only four years. Wood and Davies conclude 

J that he missed a degree, and was suddenly withdrawn from the 
university, in consequence of Pembroke's disapprobation of his 
attachment to poetry and romances, instead of logic and philo- 
sophy. Mr. Gifford prefers the authority of Langbaine, that he 
was not supported at all at Oxford by the Earl of Pembroke, but 
by his own father, and concludes that he was withdrawn from it 
solely by the calamitous event of his death. Whatever was the 
cause, he left the university abruptly, and, coming to London, 
without friends, or fortune, or profession, was, as he informs us 
himself, driven by his necessities to the stage for support. 

From the period of his arrival in London in 1606 till the year 
1622, when his ^Virgin Martyr' appeared in print, it is suffi- 
ciently singular that we should have no notice of Massinger, 
except in one melancholy relic that was discovered by Mr. Malone 
in Dulwich College, namely, a letter subscribed by him and two 
other dramatic poets,* in which they solicit the advance of five 
pounds from the theatrical manager, t to save them from the 
horrors of a gaol. The distressful document accidentally dis- 
covers the fact of Massinger having assisted Fletcher in one of 
his dramas, and thus entitles Sir Aston Cokayne's assertion to 
belief, that he assisted him in more than one. Though Massinger 
therefore did not appear in print during the long period already 
mentioned, his time may be supposed to have been partly em- 
ployed in those confederate undertakings which were so common 
during the early vigour of our stage ; and there is the strongest 
presumptive evidence that he was also engaged in plays of his 
own composition, which have been lost to the world among those 
literary treasures that perished by the neglect of Warburton, the 
Somerset herald, and the unconscious sacrilege of his cook. Of 
Massinger's fame for rapidity in composition Langbaine has pre- 

, served a testimony in the lines of a contemporary poet : after the 
date of his first printed performance, those of his subsequent 
works come in thick succession, and there can be little doubt 
that the period preceding it was equally prolific. 

* Nathaniel Field and Robert Daborne. 

t [PMip Henslowe. See Colliers Life of Alley n, p. 120.] 



214 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

Of his private life literally nothing can be said to be known, 
except that his dedications bespeak incessant distress and de- 
pendence, while the recommendatory poems prefixed to his plays 
address him wiih attributes of virtue which are seldom lavished 
wdth flattery or falsehood on those who are poor. In one of his 
dedications he acknowledges the bounty of Philip Earl of Mont- 
gomery, the brother to that Earl of Pembroke wiio so unaccount- 
ably neglected him ; but, warm as Massinger*s acknowledgments 
are, the assistance appears to have been but transitor}\* On the 
17th of March, 1640, having gone to bed in apparent health the 
preceding night, he was found dead in the morning, in his own 
house in the Bankside. He was buried in the churchyard of 
St. Saviour's, and his fellow-comedians attended him to the grave ; 
but it does not appear from the strictest search that a stone or 
inscription of any kind marked the place where his dust was 
deposited ; even the memorial of his mortality is given with a 
pathetic brevity, which accords but too well with the obscure ,. 
and humble circumstances of his life : *' March 20, 1639-40, 
buried Philip Massinger, a stranger ;"t and of all his admirers, 
only Sir Aston Cokayne dedicated a line to his memory. Even 
posterity did him long injustice ; Rowe, who had discovered his 
merits in the depth of their neglect, forbore to be his editor, in 
the hopes of concealing his plagiarism from ' The Fatal Dowry ;' J 
and he seemed on the eve of oblivion, when Dodsley's reprint of 
our old plays brought him faintly into that light of reputation 
which has been made perfectly distinct by Mr. Gifford's edition 

of his works. 

* 

SIR JOHN SUCKLING. 

[Bom, 1608. Died, 1641.] 
Suckling, who gives levity its gayest expression, was the son of 
the comptroller of the household to Charles I. Langbaine tells 

* [This is a mistake — the assistance -was even continued to the widow. 
" Mr. Philip Massinger, author of severall good playes, was a servant to his 
lordship, aud had a pension of twenty or thirty pounds per annum, which 
was payed to his wife after his decease. She lived at Cardiff, in Glamor* 
ganshire."' — Aubrey s Natural History of Wiltshire, edited by John BrittOB, 
4to., 1847, p. 91.] 

t [The real entry in the register is, " 1639. March 18. Philip Massinger, 
stranger'" — that is, a uon-parishioner.] + In ' The Fair Pemtent.' 



SUCKLING-CARTWRIGHT. 215 

us that he spoke Latin at five years of age, but with what cor- 
rectness or fluency we are not informed. His versatile mind 
certainly acquired many accomplishments, and filled a short life 
with many pursuits, for he was a traveller, a soldier, a lyric and 
dramatic poet, and a musician. After serving a campaign under 
Gustavus Adolphus, he returned to England, was favoured by 
Charles I., and wrote some pieces, which were exhibited for the 
amusement of the court with sumptuous splendour. When the 
civil wars broke out he expended 1200/.* on the equipment of a 
regiment for the king, which was distinguished, however, only 
by its finery and cowardice. A brother poet crowned his disgrace 
with a ludicrous song. The event is said to have affected him 
deeply with shame ; but he did not live long to experience that 
most incurable of the heart's diseases. Having learnt that his 
servant had robbed him, he drew on his boots in great haste ; a 
rusty nail,f that was concealed in one of them, pierced his heel, 
and produced a mortification, of which he died. His poems, his 
five plays, together with his letters, speeches, and tracts, have been 
collected into one volume. 



WILLIAM CARTWHIGHT. 

[Born, 1611. Died, 1643.] 

William Cartwright was the son of an innkeeper at Ciren- 
cester, who had been reduced to that situation by spending a 
good estate. He was a king's scholar at Westminster, and took 
orders at Oxford, where he became, says Wood, " a most florid 
and seraphic preacher." Bishop Duppa, his intimate friend, 
appointed him succentor of the church of Salisbury in 1642. In 
the same year he was one of the council of war, or delegacy, 
appointed by the University of Oxford, for providing troops sent 
by the king to protect, or, as the opposite party alleged, to over- 
a,we, the universities. His zeal in this service occasioned his 
being imprisoned by the parliamentary forces on their arrival ; 
but he was speedily released on bail. Early in the year 1643 he 

auj.i* [Rather 12,000Z. See Percy's * Reliques,' vol. ii. p. 356, where the 

ludicrous song Mr. Campbell refers to may be found.] 
"t'^-. t [Oldys says the blade of a penknife, whilst Aubrey affirms that he was 
^^isoned. The nail or blade may have been poisoned.] 



21 6 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

was appointed junior proctor of his university, and also reader in 
metaphysics. The latter office we may well suppose him to have 
filled with ability, as, according to Lloyd's account, he studied at 
the rate of sixteen hours a-day ; but he survived his appointment 
to it for a very short time, being carried off by a malignant fever, 
called the camp-disease, which was then epidemical at Oxford. 
Cartwright died in his thirty-second year; but he lived long 
enough to earn the distinguishing praise of Ben Jonson, who 
used to say of him, " My son Cartwright writes all like a man." 



GEORGE SANDYS. 

[Born, 1577. Died, 1643.] 
George Sandys, to whose translations Pope declared that 
English poetry owed much of its beauty, was the youngest son 
of the Archbishop of York. After leaving the university, he set 
out upon an extensive tour, comprehending Greece, Egypt, and 
the Holy Land, which is described in his well-known and well- 
written book of Travels. After his return to England he pub- 
lished a translation of ' The Metamorphoses ' of Ovid, and a 
Paraphrase of the Psalms of David. He translated also the 
* Christus Patiens' of Grotius. Few incidents of his life are re- 
corded. For the most part of his latter days he lived with Sir 
Francis Wenman, of Caswell, near Witney, in Oxfordshire ; a 
situation near to Burford, the retirement of his intimate friend 
Lucius Lord Falkland, who has addressed several poems to him.* 



FRANCIS QUARLES. 

[Bom, 1592. Died, 1644.] 

This voluminous saint was bred at Cambridge and Lincoln's Inn, 

and was appointed cupbearer to Elizabeth, Electress of Bohemia, 

after quitting whose service he went to Ireland, and was secretary 

to Archbishop Usher. On the breaking out of the rebellion in 

that kingdom he was a considerable sufferer, and was obliged to 

fly for safety to England. He had already been pensioned by 

* [The ingenious and learned Mr. Sandys, the best versifier of the former 
age.— Dry den.] 



SANDYS— QUARLES—W. BROWNE. 217 

Charles, and made Chronologer to the city of London ; but in the 
general ruin of the royal cause his property was confiscated, and 
his books and manuscripts, which he valued more, were plundered. 
This reverse of fortune is supposed to have accelerated his death. 
The charitable criticism of the present age has done justice to 
Quarles, in contrasting his merits with his acknowledged de- 
formities. That his perfect specimens of the bathos should have 
been laughed at in the age of Pope is not surprising.* His 
^ Emblems,' whimsical as they are, have not the merit of origin- 
ality, being imitated from Herman Hugo. A considerable re- 
semblance to Young may be traced in the blended strength and 
extravagance, and ill-assorted wit and devotion of Quarles. Like 
Young, he wrote vigorous prose — witness his ' Enchiridion.' In 
the parallel, however, it is due to the purity of Young to acknow- 
ledge that he never was guilty of such indecency as that which 
disgraces the ' Argalus and Parthenia ' of our pious author. 



WILLL4M BROWNE. 

[Born, 1590. Died, 1645.] 

"William Browne was the son of a gentleman of Tavistock, in 
Devonshire. He was educated at Oxford, and went from thence 

* Of his absurdity one example may suffice from his ' Emblems :' — 
" Man is a tennis-court, his flesh the wall, 
The gamesters God and Satan, — the heart 's the ball ; 
The higher and the lower hazards are 
Too bold presumption and too base despair : 
The rackets which our restless balls make fly, 
Adversity and sweet prosperity. 
The angels keep the court, and mark the place 
Where the ball falls, and chalk out every chase. 
The line 's a civil life we often cross, 
O'er which the ball, not flying, makes a loss. 
Detractors are like standers-by, and bet 
With charitable men, our life 's the set. 
Lord, in these conflicts, in these fierce assaults. 
Laborious Satan makes a world of faults. 
Forgive them, Lord, although he ne'er implore 
For favour, they '11 be set upon our score. 
O take the ball before it come to the ground, 
For this base court has many a false rebound ; 
Strike, and strike hard, and strike above the line, 
Strike where thou please, so as the set be thine." 



218 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

to the Inner Temple, but devoted himself chiefly to poetry. In 
his twenty-third year he published the first part of his ' Bri- 
tannia's Pastorals,' prefaced by poetical eulogies, which evince 
his having- been, at that early period of life, the friend and 
favourite of Selden and Drayton. To these testimonies he after- 
wards added that of Ben Jonson. In the following year he pub- 
lished ' The Shepherd's Pipe,' of whicli the fourth eclogue is often 
said to have been the precursor of Milton's ' Lycidas.' A single 
simile about a rose constitutes all the resemblance ! In 1616 he 
published the second part of his ' Britannia's Pastorals.* His 
' Masque of the Inner Temple ' was never printed, till Dr. Farmer 
transcribed it from a MS. of the Bodleian Library, for Thomas 
Davies's edition of Browne's works, more than 120 years after 
the author's death. 

He seems to have taken his leave of the Muses about the prime 
of his life, and returned to Oxford, in the capacity of tutor to 
Robert Dormer, Earl of Caernarvon, wlio fell in the battle of 
Newbury, 1643. After leaving the university with that noble- 
man, he found a liberal patron in William, Earl of Pembroke, 
whose character, like that of Caernarvon, still lives among the 
warmly coloured and minutely touched portraits of Lord Claren- 
don. The poet lived in Lord Pembroke's family ; and, accord- 
ing to Wood, grew rich in his employment. But the particulars 
of his history are very imperfectly known, and his verses deal too 
little with the business of life to throw much ligiit upon his cir- 
cumstances. His poetry is not without beauty ; but it is the 
beauty of mere landscape and allegory, without the manners and 
passions that constitute human interest. 



THOMAS NABBES. 

[Died, 1645.] 

This was an inferior dramatist in the time of Charles I., who, 
besides his plays, wrote a continuation of Knolles's * History of 
the Turks.' 



NABBES-HEYWOOD. 219 



THOMAS HEYWOOD. 

[Died, 1649.] 

'Thomas Heywood was the most prolific writer in the most fer- 
-ritile ao:e of our drama.* In the midst of his theatrical labours as 
nan actor and poet, he composed a formidable list of prose works, 
and defended the stage against the Puritans in a work that is 
full of learning. One of his projects was to write the lives of all 
poets that were ever distinguished, from the time of Homer down- 
wards. Yet it has happened to the framer of this gigantic design 
to have no historian so kind to his own memory as to record either 
the period of his death or the spot that covers his remains. His 
merits entitled him to better remembrance. He composed indeed 
w4th a careless rapidity, and seems to have thought as little of 
Horace's precept of '•'• scepe stylum vertas" as of most of the in- 
junctions in the * Art of Poetry.' But he possesses considerable 
power of interesting the affections, by placing his plain and 
familiar characters in affecting situations. The worst of him is, 
that his commonplace sentiments and plain incidents fall not only 
beneath the ideal beauty of art, but are often more fatiguing than 
what we meet with in the ordinary and unselected circumstances 
- x)f life. When he has hit upon those occasions where the passions 
o<Jshould obviously rise with accumulated expression, he lingers on 
-lithrough the scene with a dull and level indifference. The term 
''x-artiessness may be applied to Heywood in two very opposite 
senses. His pathos is often artless in the better meaning of the 
word, because its objects are true to life, and their feelings 
naturally expressed. But he betrays still more frequently an 
artlessness, or we should rather call it a want of art, in deficiency 
of contrivance. His best performance is ' A Woman killed with 
Kindness.' In that play the repentance of Mrs. Frankford, who 
dies of a broken heart for her infidelity to a generous husband, 
^ofivould present a situation consummately moving, if we were left 
to conceive her death to be produced simply by grief. But the 
poet most unskilfully prepares us for her death, by her declaring 

* [He had, as he himself tells us, '■'■ either an entire hand, or at the least a 
main finger, in two hundred and twenty plays." He was a native of Lin- 
colnshire.] 



LIVES OF THE POETS. 



her intentions to starve herself ; and mars, by the weakness, sin, 
and horror of suicide, an example of penitence that would other- 
wise be sublimely and tenderly edifying. The scene of the death 
of Mrs, Frankford has been deservedly noticed for its pathos by 
an eminent foreign critic, Mr. Schlegel,* who also commends the 
superior force of its inexorable morality to the reconciling con- 
clusion of Kotzebue's drama on a similar subject. The learned 
German perhaps draws his inference too rigidly. Mrs. Frank- 
ford's crime was recent, and her repentance and death imme- 
diately follow it ; but the guilt of the other tragic penitent, to 
whom Mr. S. alludes, is more remote and less, heinous ; and to 
prescribe interminable limits, either in real or imaginary life, to 
the generosity of individual forgiveness is to invest morality with 
terrors which the frailty of man and the mercy of Heaven do not 

justify. 

» 

AA^LLIAM DRUMMOND. 

[Bom, 1585. Died, 1649.J 

This poet was born at Hawthornden, his father's estate in Mid- 
Lothian, took a degree at the University of Edinburgh, studied 
the civil law in France, and, returning home, entered into pos- 
session of his paternal estate, and devoted himself to literature. 
During his residence at Hawthornden he courted, and was on the 
eve of marrying, a lady of the name of Cunningham. Her sudden 
death inspired him with a melancholy which he sought to dissi- 
pate by travelling. He accordingly visited France, Italy, and 
Germany, and, during a stay of eight years on the Continent, 
conversed with the most polished society, and studied the objects 
most interesting to curiosity and taste. He collected at the same 
time a number of books and manuscripts, some of which are still 
in the library of his native university. 

On his second return to Scotland he found the kingdom dis- 
tracted by political and religious ferment, and on the eve of a 
civil war. What connexion this aspect of public affairs had with 
his quitting Hawthornden, his biographers have not informed us, 
but so it was, that he retired to the seat of his brother-in-law, 

* Mr. Schlegel, however, is mistaken in speaking of him as anterior to 
Shakspeare, evidently confounding him with an older poet of the name. 



DRUMMOND. 221 



Sir John Scot, of Scotstarvet, a man of letters, and probably of 
political sentiments congenial with his own. At his abode be 
wrote his ' History of the Five Jameses, Kings of Scotland,' a 
work abounding in false eloquence and slavish principles. Having 
returned at length to settle himself at his own seat, he married a 
lady of the name of Logan, of the house of Restalrig, in whom 
he fancied a resemblance to his former mistress, and repaired the 
family mansion of Hawthornden, with an inscription importing 
his hopes of resting there in honourable ease. But the times 
were little suited to promote his wishes ; and on the civil war 
breaking out he involved himself with the Covenanters, by 
writing in support of the opposite side, for which his enemies 
not only called him to a severe account, but compelled him to 
furnish his quota of men and arms to support the cause which he 
detested. His estate lying in different counties, he contributed 
halves and quarters of men to the forces that were raised ; and 
on this occasion he wrote an epigram, bitterly wishing that the 
imaginary division of his recruits might be realised on their 
bodies. His grief for the death of Charles is said to have short- 
ened his days. Such stories of political sensibility may be be- 
lieved on proper evidence. 

The elegance of Drummond's sonnets, and the humour of his 
Scotch and Latin macaronics, have been at least sufficiently 
praised : but when Milton has been described as essentially 
obliged to him, the compliment to his genius is stretched too 
far. A modern writer, who edited the works of Drummond, has 
affirmed that, " perhaps," if we had had no Drummond, we should 
not have seen the finer delicacies of Milton's ' Comus,' ' Lycidas,* 
* L' Allegro,' and 'H Penseroso.' "Perhaps "is an excellent 
leading-string for weak assertions. One or two epithets of 
Drummond may be recognised in Milton, though not in the 
minor poems already mentioned. It is difficult to apply any 
precise idea to the tautology of " fine delicacies ;" but whatever 
the editor of Drummond meant by it, he may be assured that 
there is no debt on the part of Milton to the poet of Haw- 
thornden which the former could be the least impoverished by 
returning. Philips, the nephew of Milton, edited and extolled 
Drummond, and pronounced him equal to Tasso himself. It has 
been inferred from some passages of the ' Theatrum Poetarum ' 



222 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

that Milton had dictated several critical opinions in that per- 
formance ; and it has been taken for granted that Philips's high 
opinion of Drummond was imbibed from the author of ' Paradise 
Lost.' But the parallel between Drummond and Tasso surely 
could not have been drawn by Milton. Philips had a turn for 
poetry, and in many of his critical opinions in the ' Theatrura 
Poetarum ' showed a taste that could not be well attributed to 
his uncle — in none more than in this exaggerated comparison of 
a smooth sonnetteer to a mighty poet. It is equally improbable 
that he imbibed this absurdity from Milton as that he caught 
from him his admiration of Drummond's prose compositions and 
arbitrary principles. 



THOMAS MAY. 

[Born, 1595. Died, 1650.] 
Thomas May, whom Dr. Johnson has pronounced the best 
Latin poet of England, was the son of Sir Thomas May, of 
Mayfield, in Sussex. During the earlier part of his public life 
he was encouraged at the court of Charles I., inscribed several 
poems to his Majesty, as well as wrote them at his injunction, 
and received from Charles the appellation of " his poety During 
this connexion with royalty he wrote his five dramas, translated 
the ' Georgics ' and ' Pharsalia,' continued the latter in English 
as well as Latin, and by his imitation of Lucan acquired the 
reputation of a modern classic in foreign countries. It were 
much to be wished that, on siding with the parliament in the 
civil wars, he had left a valedictory testimony of regret for the 
necessity of opposing, on public grounds, a monarch who had 
been personally kind to him. The change was stigmatised as 
ungrateful ; and it was both sordid and ungrateful if the account 
given by his enemies can be relied on, that it was owing to the 
king's refusal of the laureateship, or of a pension — for the story 
is told in different ways. All that can be suggested in May's 
behalf is, that no complimentary dedications could pledge his 
principles on a great question of public justice, and that the 
motives of an action are seldom traced with scrupulous truth 
wiiere it is the bias of the narrator to degrade the action itself. 
Clarendon, the most respectable of his accusers, is exactly in 



MAY— CRASHAW. 223 



this' situation. He begins by praising his epic poetry as among 
the best in our language, and inconsistently concludes by pro- 
nouncing that May deserves to be forgotten. 

The parliament, from whatever motive he embraced their 
cause, appointed him their secretary and historiographer. In 
this capacity he wrote his * Breviary,' which Warburton pro- 
nounces " a just composition according to the rules of history." 
It breaks off, much to the loss of the history of that time, just at 
the period of the Self-denying Ordinance. Soon after this pub- 
lication he went to bed one night in apparent health, having 
drunk freely, and was found dead in the morning. His death 
was ascribed to his nightcap being tied too tightly under his 
chin. Andrew Marvell imputes it to the cheerful bottle. Taken 
together, they were no bad receipt for suffocation. The vampire 
revenge of his enemies in digging him up from his grave is an 
event too notorious in the history of the Restoration. They gave 
him honourable company in this sacrilege, namely, that of Blake. 

He has ventured in narrative poetry on a similar difficulty to 
that Shakspeare encountered in the historical drama, but it is 
unnecessary to show with how much less success. Even in that 
department, he has scarcely equalled Daniel or Drayton. 



RICHARD CRASHAW. 

[Born, 1615? Died, 1652,] 
This poet fell into neglect in his own age. He was, however, 
one of the first of our old minor poets that was rescued from 
oblivion in the following century. Pope borrowed from him, 
but acknowledged his obligations. Crashaw formed his style on 
the most quaint and conceited school of Italian poetry, that of 
Marino ; and there is a prevalent harshness and strained expres- 
sion in his verses, but there are also many touches of beauty 
and solemnity, and the strength of his thoughts sometimes 
appears even in their distortion. If it were not grown into 
a tedious and impertinent fashion to discover the sources of 
' Paradise Lost,' one might be tempted to notice some similarity 
between the speech of Satan in the ' Sospetto di Herode ' of 
Marino (which Crashaw has translated) and Satan's Address 
to the Sun in Milton. The little that is known of Crashaw's 



224 LIVES OF THE POETS.' 

life exhibits enthusiasm, but it is not that of a weak or selfish 
mind. His private character was amiable ; and we are told by 
the earliest editor of his * Steps to the Temple ' that he was 
skilled in music, drawing, and engraving. His father, of whose 
writings an account is given in the tenth volume of the * Censura 
Literaria/ was a preacher at the Temple Church, London. His 
son, the poet, was born in London, but at what time is uncertain. 
He was educated at the Charterhouse through the bounty of 
two friends, Sir Henry Yelverton and Sir Francis Crew. 
From thence he removed to Cambridge, where he became a 
fellow, and took a degree of master of arts. There he published 
his Latin poems, in one of which is the epigram from a Scripture 
passage, ending with the line, so well known, 

" Lympha pudica Deum vidit et erubuit," — 

" The modest water saw its God, and blush'd," — 

and also his pious effusions, called ' Steps to the Temple.' Tiie 
title of the latter work was in allusion to the church at Cam- 
bridge, near his residence, where he almost constantly spent his 
time. When the Covenant, in 1644, was offered to the univer- 
sities, he preferred ejection and poverty to subscribing it. 
Already he had been distinguished as a popular and powerful 
preacher. He soon after embraced the Catholic religion, and 
repaired to France. In austerity of devotion he had no great 
transition to make to Catholicism ; and his abhorrence of the 
religious innovations he had witnessed, toget'ier with his admi- 
ration of the works of the canonized St. Teresa of Spain, still 
more easily account for his conversion. Cowley found him at 
Paris in deplorable poverty, and recommended him to his exiled 
queen, Henrietta Maria. Her Majesty gave him letters of recom- 
mendation to Italy, where he became a secretary to one of the 
Roman cardinals, and a canon of the church of Loretto. Soon 
after the latter appointment he died, about the year 1652. 



WILLIAM HABINGTON. 

[Born, 1605. Died, 1654.] 
The mother of this poet, who was daughter to Lord Morley, is 
reported to have written the famous letter of warning, in con- 
sequence of which the Gunpowder Plot was discovered. His 



I HABINGTON—CHAMBERLAYNE. 225 

! father, who had been suspected of a share in Babington's con- 
spiracy, and who had owed his release to his being godson to 
; Queen Elizabeth, was a second time imprisoned, and condemned 
to death, on the charge of having concealed some of the agents 
I is the Gunpowder Plot ; but by Lord Morley's interest was 
I pardoned, on condition of confining himself to Worcestershire, 
! of which county he lived to write a voluminous history. 
I The family were Catholics ; and his son, the poet, was sent to 
i St. Omer's, we are told, with a view to make him a Jesuit, 
I which he declined. The same intention never failed to be 
i ascribed to all English families who sent their children to that 
I seminary. On his return from the Continent he lived chiefly 
with his father, who was his preceptor. Of the subsequent 
course of his life nothing more seems to be on record than his 
marriage and his literary works. The latter consisted of effusions 
entitled ' Castara,' the poetical name of his mistress ; ' The Queen 
of Arragon,' a tragi-comedy ; a ' History of Edward IV. ;' and 
^ Observations upon History/ 

Habington became a poet from the courtship of the lady 
whom he married, Lucy, daughter to Lord Powis. There is no 
very ardent sensibility in his lyrics, but they denote a mind of 
elegant and chaste sentiments. He is as free as any of the minor 
poets of his age from the impurities which were then considered 
as wit. He is indeed rather ostentatiously platonic, but his love 
language is far from being so elaborate as the complimentary 
gallantry of the preceding age. A respectable gravity of thought, 
and succinct fluency of expression, are observable in the poems 
of his later life. 



WILLIAM CHAMBERLAYNE. 

[Born, 1619. Died, Jan. 11, leSQ.] 

I BELIEVE the only notice of this poet that is to be found is in 
Langbaine, who informs us that he was a physician at Shaftes- 
bury, in Dorsetshire, in the reigns of Charles I. and II. He 
wrote a single tragi-comedy, ' Love's Victory,' which was acted 
after the Restoration under the new title of ' Wits led by the 
Nose, or the Poet's Revenge.' His ' Pharonnida,' an heroic 
poem, in five books, which Langbaine says has nothing to re- 

Q 



226 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



commend it, is one of the most interesting stories that was eveir 4 
told in verse, and contained so much amusing matter as to be" j 
made into a prose novel in the reign of Charles II. What) \ 
Dr. Johnson said unjustly of Milton's ' Comus,' that it was like i 
gold hid under a rock, may unfortunately be applied with too r] 
much propriety to * Pharonnida.* Never, perhaps, was so much i 
beautiful design in poetry marred by infelicity of execution : his 
ruggedness of versiScation, abrupt transitions, and a style that is 
at once slovenly and quaint, perpetually interrupt us in enjoying ;j 
the splendid figures and spirited passions of this romantic tablet, 
and make us catch them only by glimpses. I am well aware 
that from a story so closely interwoven a few selected passages, : 
while they may be more than sufficient to exemplify the faults, -, 
are not enough to discover the full worth of Charaberlayne. 
His sketches, already imperfect, must appear still more so in the 
shape of fragments ; we must peruse the narrative itself to 
appreciate the rich breadth and variety of its scenes, and we 
must, perhaps, accustom our vision to the thick medium of its 
uncouth style to enjoy the power and pathos of his characters 
and situations. Under all the defects of the poem, the reader 
will then indeed feel its unfinished hints affect the heart and 
dilate the imagination. From the fate of Chamberlayne a young 
poet may learn one important lesson, that he who neglects the 
subsidiary graces of taste has every chance of being neglected 
by posterity, and that the pride of genius must not prompt him 
to disdain the study of harmony and of style. 



RICHARD LOVELACE. 

[Bom, 1618. Died, 1658.] 

This gallant, unfortunate man, who was much distinguished i\ . 
the beauty of his person, was the son of Sir William Lovelace, 
of Woolwich, in Kent. After taking a master's degree at 
Cambridge, he was for some time an officer in the army ; but 
returned to his native country after the pacification of Berwick, 
and took possession of his paternal estate, worth about 500/. perj 
annum. About the same time he was deputed by the county of 
Kent to deliver their petition to the House of Commons for 



j LOVELACE— MRS. PHILIPS— HEMINGE. 227 

'restoring the king to his rights and settling the government. 
This petition gave such offence that he was committed to the 
i Gate-house prison, and only released on finding bail to an 
enormous amount not to pass beyond the lines of communication. 
I During his confinement to London his fortune was wasted in 
'support of the royal cause. In 1646 he formed a regiment for 
I the service of the French king, was colonel of it, and was 
i wounded at Dunkirk. On this occasion his mistress, Lucasta, a 
jMiss Lucy Sacheverel, married another, hearing that he had 
\ died of his wounds. At the end of two years he returned to 
! England, and was again imprisoned till after the death of 
I Charles I. He was then at liberty ; but, according to Wood, 
was left in the most destitute circumstances, his estate being 
gone. He, who had been the favourite of courts, is represented 
as having lodged in the most obscure recesses of poverty, and 
died in great misery in a lodging near Shoe-lane. 



KATHERINE PHILIPS. 

[Born, 1631. Died, 1664.] 

Mrs. Katherine Philips, wife of James Philips, Esq., of the 
Priory of Cardigan. Her maiden name was Fowler. She died 
of the small-pox, in her thirty-third year. The matchless 
Orinda, as she was called, cannot be said to have been a woman 
of genius ; but her verses betoken an interesting and placid 
enthusiasm of heart, and a cultivated taste, that form a beautiful 
specimen of female character. She translated two of the tra- 
gedies of Corneille, and left a volume of letters to Sir Charles 
Cotterell, which were published a considerable time after her 
death. Jeremy Taylor addressed to her his * Measures and 
Offices of Friendship,' and Cowley, as also Flatman, his imitator, 
honoured her memory with poetical tributes. 



^VILLIAM HEMINGE. 

This writer was the son of John Heminge the famous player, 
who was contemporary with Shakspeare, and whose name is pre- 
fixed, together with that of Condell, to the folio edition of the 

q2 



228 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

great poet's works. He was born in 1602, and received his 
education at Oxford. This is all that is mentioned of him by 
the compilers of the ' Biographia Dramatica.' 



JAMES SHIRLEY. 

[Born, 1596. Died, 1666.] 

James Shirley was born in London. He was educated at 
Cambridge,* where he took the degree of A.M. and had a 
curacy for some time at or near St. Alban's, but, embracing 
popery, became a schoolmaster [1623] in that town. Leaving 
this employment, he settled in London as a dramatic writer, and 
between the years 1625 and 1666 published thirty- nine plays. 
In the civil wars he followed his patron, the Earl of Newcastle, 
to the field ; but on the decline of the royal cause returned to 
London, and, as the theatres were now shut, kept a school in 
Whitefriars, where he educated many eminent characters. At 
the re-opening of the theatres he must have been too old to have 
renewed his dramatic labours ; and what benefit the Restoration 
brought him as a royalist we are not informed. Both he and 
his wife died on the same day, immediately after the great fire of 
London, by which they had been driven out of their house, and 
probably owed their deaths to their losses and terror on that 

occasion.! 

> 

ALEXANDER BROME. 

[Bom, 1620. Died, 1666.] 

Alexander Brome was an attorney in the Lord Mayor's 
court. From a verse in one of his poems, it would seem that 

* He had studied also at Oxford, where "Wood says that Laud objected to 
his taking orders, on account of a mole on his left cheek, which greatly dis- 
figured him. This fastidiousness about personal beauty is certainly beyond 
the Levitical law. [As no mention of Shirley occurs in any of the public 
records of Oxford, the duration of his residence at St. John's College cannot 
be determined. — Dyce's ' Life,' p. v.] 

t [Shirley was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same 
language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common. A new 
language, and quite a new turn of tragic and comic interest, came in with 
the Restoration.- -Lamb,] 



SHIRLEY— BROME—HERRICK. 229 

! he had been sent once in the civil war (by compulsion no doubt), 
: on the parliament side, but had stayed only three days, and never 
j fought against the King and the cavaliers. He was in truth a 
strenuous loyalist, and the bacchanalian songster of his party. 
j Most of the songs and epigrams that were published against the 
I Rump have been ascribed to him. He had besides a share in a 
I translation of Horace, with Fanshawe, Holiday, Cowley, and 
j others, and published a single comedy, ^ The Cunning Lovers,' 
i which was acted in 1651, at the private house in Drury-lane. 
j There is a playful variety in his metre that probably had a 
i better eiFect in song than in reading. His thoughts on love and 
! the bottle have at least the merit of being decently jovial, though 
be arrays the trite arguments of convivial invitation in few ori- 
ginal images. In studying the traits and complexion of a past 
age, amusement, if not illustration, will often be found from the 
ordinary effusions of party ridicule. In this view the ' Diurnal,' 
and other political satires of Brome, have an extrinsic value as 
! contemporary caricatures. 



ROBERT HERRICK. 

[Born, 1591.] 

Herrick's vein of poetry is very irregular ; but where the ore 
is pure it is of high value. His song beginning " Gather ye 
rose-buds while ye may," is sweetly Anacreontic. Nichols, in 
his ' History of Leicestershire,' has given the fullest account of 
his history hitherto published, and reprinted many of his poems, 
which illustrate his family connexions. He was the son of an 
eminent goldsmith in Cheapside, was born in London, and edu- 
cated at Cambridge. Being patronised by the Earl of Exeter, 
he was, in 1629, presented by Charles I. to the vicarage of Dean 
!^rior in Devonshire, from which he was ejected during the civil 
WQ'Ti and then, having assumed the habit of a layman, resided in 
"Westminster. After the Restoration he was replaced in his 
vicarage. To his ' Hesperides,' or works human and divine, he 
added some pieces on religious subjects, where his volatile genius 
was not in her element. 



'230 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



ABRAHAM COWLEY. 

[Born, 1618. Died, 1667.] 

Abraham Cowley was the posthumous son of a grocer in 
London. His mother, thoug^h left a poor widow, found means to 
get him educated at Westminster School, and he obtained a 
scholarship at Cambridge. Before leaving the former seminary- 
he published his ' Poetical Blossoms.' He wrote verses while yet 
a child ; and amidst his best poetry as well as his worst, in his 
touching and 'tender as well as extravagant passages, there is 
always something that reminds us of childhood in Cowley. 
From Cambridge he was ejected in 1643 for his loyalty ; after a 
short retirement he was induced by his principles to follow the 
Queen to Paris, as secretary to the Earl of St. Alban's, and, 
during an absence of ten years from his native country, was 
employed in confidential journeys for his party, and in decipher- 
ing the royal correspondence. The object of his return to 
England, in 1656, I am disposed to think, is misrepresented by 
his biographers ; they tell us that he came over, under pretence 
of privacy, to give notice of the posture of affairs. Cowley came 
home indeed, and published an edition of his poems, in the pre- 
face to which he decidedly declares himself a quietist under the 
existing government, abjures the idea of all political hostility, 
and .tells us that he had not only abstained from printing, but 
had burnt the very copies of his verses that alluded to the civil 
wars. " The enmities of fellow-citizens," he continues, " should 
be like those of lovers, the redintegration of their amity." If 
Cowley employed this language to make his privacy the deeper 
pretence for giving secret intelligence, his office may be worthily 
named that of a spy ; but the manliness and placidity of his cha- 
racter render it much more probable that he was sincere in those 
declarations ; nor were his studious pursuits, which were chiefly 
botanical, well calculated for political intrigue. He took a 
doctor's degree, but never practised, and was one of the earliest 
members of the Philosophical Society. While Butler's satire 
was unworthily employed in ridiculing the infancy of that insti- 
tution, Cowley's wit took a more than ordinary stretch of per- 



' COWLEY. 231 



version in the good intention of commending it. Speaking of 

Bacon, he calls him 

" the miglity man, 
Whom a wise king and nature chose 
To be the chancellor of both their laws." 

At his first arrival in England he had been imprisoned, and 
obliged to find bail to a great amount. On the death of Crom- 
well he considered himself at liberty, and went to France, where 
he stopped till the Restoration. At that event, when men who 
had fought under Cromwell were rewarded for coming over to 
Charles II., Cowley was denied the mastership of the Savoy on 
pretence of his disloyalty, and the Lord Chancellor told him that 
his pardon was his reward. The sum of his offences was, that 
he had lived peaceably under the usurping government, though 
without having published a word, even in his amiable and pacific 
preface, that committed his principles. But an absurd idea pre- 
vailed that his ' Cutter of Coleman-street' was a satire on his party, 
and he had published an ode to Brutus ! It is impossible to con- 
trast this injured honesty of Cowley with the successful pro- 
fligacy of Waller and Dryden, and not to be struck with the all- 
prevailing power of impudence. In such circumstances it is 
little to be wondered at that Cowley should have sighed for 
retirement, and been ready to accept of it even in the deserts of 
America. Misanthropy, as far as so gentle a nature could 
cherish it, naturally strengthened his love of retirement, and in- 
creased that passion for a country life which breathes in the 
fancy of his poetry, and in the eloquence of his prose. By the 
influence of Buckingham and St. Alban's, he at last obtained a 
competence of about 300/. a-year from a lease of the Queen'9 
lands, which enabled him to retire, first to Barnes Elms, and 
afterwards to Chertsey, on the Thames. But his health was now 
declining, and he did not long experience either the sweets or 
inconveniences of rustication. He died, according to Dr. Sprat, 
^n consequence of exposing himself to cold one evening that he 
stayed late among his labourers. Another account ascribes his 
death to being benighted in the fields, after having spent too 
convivial an evening with the same Dr. Sprat. 



232 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

SIR RICHARD FANSHAWE. 

[Bora, 1608. Died, 1666.] 

Sir Richard Fakshawe, the son of Sir Henry Fanshawe, 
remembrancer of the Irish Exchequer, was born at Ware, in 
Hertfordshire, in 1608. An accomplished traveller, he gave our 
language some of its earliest and most important translations 
from modern literature, and acted a distinguished part under the 
Charleses in the political and diplomatic history of England. 



I 



SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 

[Bora, 1608. Died, 1668.] 

Daven ant's personal history is sufficiently curious without 
attaching importance to the insinuation of Wood, so gravely 
taken up by Mr. Malone, tliat he was the son of Shakspeare. 
He was the son of a vintner at Oxford, at whose house the im- 
mortal poet is said to have frequently lodged. Having risen to 
notice by his tragedy of ' Albovine,' he wrote masques for the 
court of Charles I., and was made governor of the King and 
Queen's company of actors in Drury-lane. In the civil wars we 
find the theatric manager quickly transmuted into a lieutenant- 
general of ordnance, knighted for his services at the siege of 
Gloucester, and afterwards negotiating between the King and 
his advisers at Paris. There he began his poem of ' Gondibert,' 
which he laid aside for a time for the scheme of carrying a 
colony from France to Virginia ; but his vessel was seized by 
one of the parliament ships, he was thrown into prison, and owed 
his life to friendly interference, it is said to that of Milton, whose 
friendship he returned in kind. On being liberated, his ardent 
activity was shown in attempting to restore theatrical amuse- 
ments in the very teeth of bigotry and puritanism, and he actually 
succeeded so far as to open a theatre in the Charterhouse Yard. 
At the Restoration he received the patent of the Duke's theatre 
in Lincoln's Inn Fields, which he held till his death. 

* Gondibert ' heis divided the critics. It is undeniable, on the 
one hand, that he showed a high and independent conception of 



FANSHAWE— DAVENANT— DENHAM. 233 

epic poetry, in wishing to emancipate it from the slavery of 
ancient authority, and to establish its interest in the dignity of 
human nature, without incredible and stale machinery. His 
subject was well chosen from modern romantic story, and he 
strove to give it the close and compact symmetry of the drama. 
Ingenious and witty images, and majestic sentiments, are thickly 
scattered over the poem. But Gondibert, who is so formally 
described, has certainly more of the cold and abstract air of an 
historical than of a poetical portrait, and, unfortunately, the 
beauties of the poem are those of elegy and epigram, more than 
of heroic fiction. It wants the charm of free and forcible narra- 
tion ; the life-pulse of interest is incessantly stopped by solemn 
pauses of reflection, and the story works its way through an 
intricacy of superfluous fancies, some beautiful and others con- 
ceited, but all, as they are united, tending to divert the interest, 
like a multitude of weeds upon a stream, that entangle its course 
while they seem to adorn it. 



SIR JOHN DENHAM. 

[Born, 1615. Died, 1668.] 

Sir John Denham was born in Dublin, where his father was 
chief-baron of the Irish Exchequer. On his father's accession 
to the same office in the English Exchequer, our poet was 
brought to London, and there received the elements of his learn- 
ing. At Oxford he was accounted a slow, dreaming young man, 
and chiefly noted for his attachment to cards and dice. The 
same propensity followed him to Lincoln's Inn, to such a degree 
that his father threatened to disinherit him. To avert this, he wrote 
a penitentiary ' Essay on Gaming ;' but after the death of his 
father he returned to the vice that most easily beset him, and irre- 
coverably injured his patrimony. In 1641, when his tragedy of 
* The Sophy ' appeared, it was regarded as a burst of unpromised 
genius. In the better and bygone days of the drama, so tame a 
production would not perhaps have been regarded as astonishing, 
even from a dreaming young man. He was soon after appointed 
high-sheriff* of Surrey, and made governor of Farnham Castle for 
the King ; but being unskilled in military affairs, he resigned his 



234 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



command, and joined his Majesty at Oxford, where he published 
his ' Cooper's Hill.* In the civil wars he served the royal family 
by conveying their correspondence; but was at length obliged to 
quit the kingdom, and was sent as ambassador, by Charles II. 
in his exile, to the King of Poland. At the Eestoration he was 
made surveyor of the King's buildings, and knighted with the 
order of the Bath ; but his latter days were embittered by a 
second marriage, that led to a temporary derangement of mind. 



GEORGE WITHER. 

[Bom, 1588. Died, 1667.] 

George Wither, the descendant of a family who had for 
several generations possessed the property of Manydowne, in 
Hampshire, was born in that county, at Bentworth, near Alton. 
About the age of sixteen he was sent to Oxford, where he had just 
begun to fall in love with the mysteries of logic, when he was called 
home by his father, much to his mortification, to hold the plough. 
He was even afraid of being put to some mechanical trade, when 
he contrived to get to London, and with great simplicity had pro- 
posed to try his fortune at court. To his astonishment, however, 
he found that it was necessary to flatter in order to be a courtier. 
To show his independence he therefore wrote his * Abuses Whipt 
and Stript,' and, instead of rising at court, was committed for 
some months to the Marshalsea.* But if his puritanism excited 
enemies, his talents and frankness gained him friends. He 
appears to have been intimate with the poet Browne, and to have 
been noticed by Selden. To the latter he inscribed his trans- 
lation of the poem on the Nature of Man, from the Greek of 
Bishop Nemesius, an ancient father of the church. While in 
prison he wrote his ' Shepherd's Hunting,' which contains per- 
haps the very finest touches that ever came from his hasty and 
irregular pen, and, besides those prison eclogues, composed his 
' Satire to the King,' a justification of his former satires, which, 

* He was imprisoned for his * Abuses Whipt and Stript ;' yet this could 
not have been his first offence, as an allusion is made to a former accusation. 
[It was for 'The Scourge' (1615) that his first knoMn imprisonment took 
place.] 



WITHER. 235 



if it gained him his liberation, certainly effected it without retract- 
ing his principles. 

It is not probable that the works of Wither will ever be pub- 
lished collectively, curious as they are, and occasionally marked 
by originality of thought : but a detailed list of them is given in 
the ' British Bibliographer.' From youth to age George con- 
tinued to pour forth his lucubrations, in propliecy, remonstrance, 
complaint, and triumph, through good and evil report, through 
all vicissitudes of fortune : at one time in command among the 
saints, and at another scrawling his thoughts in gaol, when pen 
and ink were denied him, with red ochre upon a trencher. It 
is generally allowed that his taste and genius for poetry did not 
improve in the political contest. Some of his earliest pieces 
display the native amenity of a poet's imagination ; but, as he 
mixed with the turbulent times, his fancy grew muddy with the 
stream. "While Milton in the same cause brought his learning 
and zeal as a partisan, he left the Muse behind him, as a mistress 
too sacred to be introduced into party brawlings : Wither, on 
the contrary, took his Muse along with him to the camp 
and the congregation, and it is little to be wondered at that 
her cap should have been torn and her voice made hoarse in the 
confusion. 

Soon after his liberation from prison he published the ' Hymns 
and Songs of the Clmrch,' one edition of which is dedicated to 
King James, in which he declares that the hymns were printed 
under his Majesty's gracious protection. One of the highest 
dignitaries of the church also sanctioned his performance ; but 
as it was Wither's fate to be for ever embroiled, he had soon 
after occasion to complain that the booksellers, " those cruel 
bee-masters," as he calls them, " who burn the poor Athenian 
bees for their honey," endeavoured to subvert his copyright; 
while some of the more zealous clergymen complained that he 
had interfered with their calling, and slanderous persons teimed 
This hymns needless songs and popish rhymes. From any sus- 
picion of popery his future labours were more than sufficient to 
clear him. James, it appears, encouraged him to finish a trans- 
lation of the Psalms, and was kindly disposed towards him. 
Soon after the decease of his sovereign, on remembering that he 
had vowed a pilgrimage to the Queen of Bohemia, he travelled 



236 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

to her court to accomplish his vow, and presented her Highness 
with a copy of his Psalms. 

In 1639 he was a captain of horse in the expedition against 
the Scots, and quartermaster-general of his regiment, under the 
Earl of Arundel. But as soon as the civil wars broke out he 
sold his estate to raise a troop of horse for the parliament, and 
soon afterwards rose to the rank of major. In the month of 
October of the same year, 1642, he was appointed by parliament 
captain and commander of Farnham Castle, in Surrey ; but his 
government was of short duration, for the castle was ceded on 
the 1st of December to Sir William "Waller. Wither says, in 
his own justification, that he was advised by his superiors to quit 
the place ; while his enemies alleged that he deserted it. The 
defence of his conduct which he published seems to have been 
more resolute than his defence of the fortress. In the course of 
the civil war he was made prisoner by the royalists, and, when 
some of them were desirous of making an example of him, 
Denham, the poet, is said to have pleaded with his Majesty that 
he would not hang him, for as long as Wither lived he (Denham) 
could not be accounted the worst poet in England. Wood in- 
forms us that he was afterwards constituted by Cromwell major- 
general of all the horse and foot in the county of Surrey. In 
his addresses to Cromwell there is, mixed with his usual garrulity 
of advice and solemnity of warning, a considerable degree of 
adulation. His admonitions probably exposed him to little 
hazard ; they were the croakings of the raven on the right hand. 
It should be mentioned, however, to the honour of his declared 
principles, that in the 'National Remembrancer' he sketched 
the plan of an annual and freely elected parliament, which dif- 
fered altogether from the shadow of representation afforded by 
the government of the usurper. On the demise of Cromwell he 
hailed the accession of Richard with joyful gratulation. He 
never but once in his life foreboded good, and in that prophecy 
he was mistaken. 

At the Restoration the estates which he had either acquired 
or purchased during the interregnum were taken from him. 
But the event which crushed his fortunes could not silence his 
pen, and he was committed first to Newgate and afterwards to 
the Tower, for remonstrances which were deemed a libel on the 



MAYNE. 237 



new government. From the multitude of his writings, during a 
three years' imprisonment, it may be clearly gathered that he 
was treated not only with rigour, but injustice ; for the con- 
fiscation of his property was made by forcible entry, and, besides 
being illegal in form, was directly contrary to the declaration 
that had been issued by Charles II. before his accession. That 
he died in prison may be inferred from the accounts, though not 
clear from the dates of his biographers ; but his last days must 
have been spent in wretchedness and obscurity.* He was buried 
between the east door and the south end of the Savoy church, in 
the Strand. 



JASPER MAYNE. 

[Bom, 1604. Died, 1672.] 

This w^riter has a cast of broad humour that is amusing, though 
prone to extravagance. The idea, in ' The City Match,' of 
Captain Quartfield and his boon companions exposing simple 
Timothy dead drunk, and dressed up as a sea-monster, for a 
show, is not, indeed, within the boundaries of either taste or 
credibility ; but amends is made for it in the next scene, of old 

■ Warehouse and Seathrift witnessing in disguise the joy of their 
li<heirs at their supposed deaths. Among the many interviews of 

this nature, by which comedy has sought to produce merriment 

and surprise, this is not one of the worst managed. Plotwell's 

1^'cool impudence is well supported, when he gives money to the 

■ waterman (who tells that he had escaped by swimming at the 

time the old citizens were drowned) : — 

" There, friend, there is 
A fare for you : I'm glad you "scaped ; I had 
Not known the news so soon else." 

Dr. Mayne was a clergyman in Oxfordshire. He lost his 

* [He was released from prison on the 27th of July, 1663, on his bond to 
the Lieutenant of the Tower for his good behaviour; and died, though not in 
prison, on the 2nd of May, 1667. — See Willmott's ' Lives of the Sacred Poets,' 
vol. i. The praises of poetry have been often sung in ancient and modern times ; 
strange powers have been ascribed to it of influence over animate and in- 
animate auditors ; its force over fascinated crowds has been acknowledged ; 
but, before Wither, no one had celebrated its power at home — the wealth and 
the strength which this divine gift confers upon its possessor. — Charles 
Lamb.] 



238 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

livings at the death of Charles I., and became chaplain to the 
Earl of Devonshire, who made him acquainted with Hobbes ; 
but the philosopher and the poet are said to have been on no very- 
agreeable terms. At the Restoration he was reinstated in his 
livings, made a canon of Christ Church, Archdeacon of Chi- 
chester, and chaplain in ordinary to the King. Besides the 
comedy of ' The City Match,* he published a tragi-comedy 
called * The Amorous "War,' several sermons, dialogues from 
Lucian, and a pamphlet on the civil wars. 



RICHARD BRATHWAITE. 

fBorn, 1588. Died, 1673.] 

Richard Brathwaite, mentioned incidentally by Warton as 
a pastoral poet, but more valuable as a fluent though inelegant 
satirist, was the son of Thomas Brathwaite of Warcop, near 
Appleby, in Westmoreland. When he had finished his education 
at both universities, his father gave him the estate of Barnside, 
in Westmoreland, [where he held a commission in the militia, and 
was deputy-lieutenant of the county. His latter days were spent 
near Richmond, in Yorkshire, where he died with a highly re- 
spectable character. To the list of his pieces enumerated by 
Wood, two have been since added by Mr. Ellis and Mr. 
Malone. amounting in all to nineteen, among which are two 
tragi-comedies, ' Mercurius Britannicus ' and * The Regicidium.' 



JOHN MILTON. 

[Born, 1608. Died, 1674.] 

If the memory of Milton has been outraged by Dr. Johnson's 
hostility, the writings of Blackburne, Hayley, and, above all, 
of Symmons, may be deemed sufficient to have satisfied the 
poet's injured shade. Tlie apologies for Milton have, indeed, 
been rather full to superfluity than defective. Dr. Johnson's 
triumphant regret at the supposed whipping of our great poet at 
the university is not more amusing than the alarm of his favour- 
able biographers at the idea of admitting it to be true. From 
all that has been written on tlie subject, it is perfectly clear that 



BRATHWAITE— MILTON. 239 

Milton committed no offence at college which could deserve an 
ignominious punishment. Admitting Aubrey's authority for 
the anecdote, and his authority is not very high, it points out 
the punishment not as a public infliction, but as the personal act 
of his tutor, who resented or imagined some unkindnesses. 

The youthful history of Milton, in despite of this anecdote, 
presents him in an exalted and amiable light. His father, a man 
of no ordinary attainments, and so accomplished a musician* as 
to rank honourably among the composers of his age, intended 
him for the ministry of the church, and furnished him with a 
private tutor, who probably seconded his views ; but the piety 
that was early instilled into the poet's mind grew up, with the 
size of his intellect, into views of religious independence that 
would not have suited any definite ecclesiastical pale; and if 
Milton had become a preacher, he must have founded a church 
of his own. Whilst a boy, the intensity of his studies laid the 
seeds of his future blindness ; and at that period the Latin verses 
addressed to his father attest not only the prematurity of his 
attainments, but the endearing strength of his affections. 

The few years which he spent at his father's house, at Horton, 
in Buckinghamshire, after leaving the university, and before 
setting out on his travels, were perhaps the happiest in his life. 
In the beautiful scenery of that spot, disinclined to any profes- 
sion by his universal capacity and thirst for literature, he de- 
voted himself to study, and wrote the most exquisite of his minor 
poems. Such a mind, in the opening prime of its genius, en- 
joying rural leisure and romantic walks, and luxuriating in the 
production of ' Comus ' and ' The Arcades,' presents an inspiring 
idea of human beatitude. 

When turned of thirty he went to Italy, the most accom- 
plished Englishman that ever visited her classical shores. The 
attentions that were there shown to him are well known. We 
find him at the same time, though a stranger and a heretic, 
boldly expressing his opinions within the verge of the Vatican. 
There also, if poetry ever deigns to receive assistance from the 
younger art, his imagination may have derived at least congenial 

* Milton was early instructed in music. As a poet he speaks like one 
habituated to inspiration under its influence, and seems to have attached 
considerable importance to the science in his system of education. 



240 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

impressions from the frescoes of Michael Angelo, and the pic- 
tures of Raphael ; and those impressions he may have possibly- 
recalled in the formation of his great poem, when his eyes were 
shut upon the world, and when he looked inwardly for " god- 
like shapes and forms." 

In the eventful year after his return from the Continent, the 
fate of Episcopacy, which was yet undecided, seemed to depend 
chiefly on the influence which the respective parties could exer- 
cise upon the public mind, through the medium of the press, 
which was now set at liberty by the ordinance of the Long Par- 
liament. Milton's strength led him foremost on his own side of 
the controversy ; he defended the five ministers, whose book was 
entitled ' Smectymnuus,' against the learning and eloquence of 
Bishop Hall and Archbishop Usher, and became, in literary 
warfare, the bulwark of his party. It is performing this and 
similar services which Dr. Johnson calls Milton's vapouring 
away his patriotism in keeping a private boarding-house; and 
such are the slender performances at which that critic proposes 
that we should indulge in some degree of merriment. Assuredly, 
if Milton wielded the pen instead of the sword in public dis- 
pute, his enemies had no reason to regard the former weapon as 
either idle or impotent in his hand. An invitation to laugh on' 
such an occasion may remind us of what' Sternhold and Hopkins 
denominate ''awful mirth;" for of all topics which an enemy to 
Milton's principles could select, his impotence in maintaining 
them is the most unpropitious to merriment. 

The most difficult passage of his life for his biographers t( > 
comment upon with entire satisfaction is his continued accept- 
ance of Cromwell's wages after Cromwell had become a t}'rant. 
It would be uncandid to deny that his fear of the return of the' 
Stuarts, the symptoms of his having been seldom at the usurper's' 
court, and the circumstance of his having given him advice to 
spare the liberties of the people, form some apology for this 
negative adherence. But if the people, according to his own 
ideas, were capable of liberty after Cromwell's death, they were 
equally so before it ; and a renunciation of his profits under the 
despot would have been a nobler and fuller sacrifice to public 
principles than any advice. From ordinary men this was more 
than could be expected ; but Milton prescribed to others such 



MARVELL. 241 



austerity of duty, that, in proportion to the altitude of his cha- 
racter, the world, which looked to him for example, had a right 
to expect his practical virtue to be severe. 



ANDREW MARVELL, 

[Born, 1620. Died, 1678.] 

A BETTER edition of Marvell's works than any that has been 
given is due to his literary and patriotic character. He was the 
champion of Milton's living reputation, and the victorious sup- 
porter of free principles against Bishop Parker, when that venal 
apostate to bigotry promulgated in his ' Ecclesiastical Polity,* 
" that it was more necessary to set a severe government over 
men's consciences and religious persuasions than over their vices 
and immoralities." The humour and eloquence of Marvell's 
prose tracts were admired, and probably imitated, by Swift.* 
In playful exuberance of figure he sometimes resembles Burke. 
For consistency of principles, it is not so easy to find his parallel. 
His few poetical pieces betray some adherence to the school of 
conceit, but there is much in it that comes from the heart warm, 
pure, and affectionate. 

He was a native of Hull. At the age of fifteen he wa& 
seduced from Cambridge by the proselytising Jesuits, but was 
brought back from London by his father, returned to the univer- 
sity, and continued for ever after an enemy to superstition and 
intrigue. In 1640, his father, who was a clergyman of Hull, 
embarked on the Humber in company with a youthful pair 
whom he was to marry at Barrow, in Lincolnshire. Though 
the weather was calm when they entered the boat, the old gen- 
tleman expressed a whimsical presentiment of danger by throwing 
his cane ashore, and crying out, " Ho for heaven !"f A storm 
came on, and the whole company perished. 

In consequence of this catastrophe, the gentleman whose daughter 

* [We still read Marvell's answer to Parker with pleasure, though the 
book it answers be sunk long ago. — Swift's Apology for A Tale of a Tub.'] 

t The story is told differently in the ' Biographia Britannica ;' but the 
circumstance related there, of a beautiful boy appearing to the mother of the 
drowned lady, and disappearing with the mystery of a supernatural being, 
gives an air of incredibility to the other account. 

R 



242 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

was to have been married, adopted young Mar veil as his son, 
conceiving his father to have sacrificed his life in performing an 
act of friendship. Marvell's education was thus enlarged : he 
travelled for his improvement over a considerable part of Europe, - 
and was for some time at Constantinople as secretary to the 
English embassy at that court. Of his residence and employ- 
ments for several years there is no account, till, in 1653, he was 
engaged by the Protector to superintend the education of a Mr. 
Button, at Eton ; and for a year and a half before Milton's 
death he was assistant to Milton in the office of Latin Secretary ' 
to the Protector. He sat in the parliament of 1660 as one of 
the representatives of the city of Hull, and was re-elected as 
long as he lived. At the beginning of the reign, indeed, we 
find him absent for two years in Germany and Holland, and on I 
his return, having sought leave from his constituents, he accom- ^ 
panied Lord Carlisle as ambassador's secretary to the Northern ;. 
courts; but from the year 1665 till his death his attendance in , 
the House of Commons was uninterrupted, and exhibits a zeal ; 
in parliamentary duty that was never surpassed. Constantly , 
corresponding with his constituents, he was at once earnest for r 
their public rights and for their local interests. After the most . 
fatiguing attendances, it was his practice to send them a minute i 
statement of public proceedings, before he took either sleep or , 
refreshment. Though he rarely spoke, his influence in both. . 
Houses was so considerable, that, when Prince Rupert (who ofteu ■* 
consulted him) voted on the popular side, it used to be said that - 
the prince had been with his tutor. He was one of the last , 
members who received the legitimate stipend for attendance, 
and his grateful constituents would often send him a barrel of 
ale as a token of their regard. The traits that are recordec^ \ 
of his public spirit and simple manners give an air of proba-j 
bility to the popular story of his refusal of a court-bribe. 
Charles II., having met with Marvell in a private company, 
found his manners so agreeable, that he could not imagine a 
man of such complacency to possess inflexible honesty; he 
accordingly, as it is said, sent his lord-treasurer, Danby, to him 
next day, who, after mounting several dark staircases, found the 
author in a veiy mean lodging, and proffered him a mark of hid 
Majesty's consideration. Marvell assured the lord-treasurer that 



BUTLER— COTTON. 243 



he was not in want of the King's assistance, and humorously 
illustrated his independence by calling his servant to witness 
that he had dined for three days successively on a shoulder of 
mutton ; and having given a dignified and rational explanation 
j of his motives to the minister, went to a friend and borrowed a 
j guinea. The story of his death having been occasioned by 
I poisoning, it is to be hoped, was but a party fable. It is cer- 
! tain, however, that he had been threatened with assassination. 
I The corporation of Hull voted a sum for his funeral expenses, 
I and for an appropriate monument. 



SAMUEL BUTXER. 

[Born, 1612. Died, 1680.] 

The merit of ' Hudibras,* excellent as it is, certainly lies in its 
style and execution, and by no means in the structure of the 
story. The action of the poem, as it stands, and interrupted as it 
is, occupies but three days ; and it is clear, from the opening 
fine, " When civil dudgeon first grew high," that it was meant 
to bear date with the civil wars. Yet, after two days and nights 
are completed, the poet skips at once, [in the third part, to 
Oliver Cromwell's death, and then returns to retrieve his hero, 
and conduct him through the last canto. Before the third part 
of ' Hudibras ' appeared, a great space of time had elapsed since 
the publication of the first. Charles II. had been fifteen years 
asleep on the throne, and Butler seems to have felt that the 
ridicule of the sectaries had grown a stale subject. The final 
ititerest of the piece, therefore, dwindles into the widow's re- 
pulse of Sir Hudibras — a topic which has been suspected to 
allude, not so much to the Presbyterians, as to the reignino- 
riidnarch's dotage upon his mistresses. 

.9i; 



CHARLES COTTON. 

[Born, 1630. Died, 1686-7.] 
']^b:eke is a careless and happy humour in this poet's ' Voyage 
U^ Ireland,' which seems to anticipate the manner of Anstey in 
S'jChe Bath Guide.' The tasteless indelicacy of his parody of 

a 2 



244 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

* The ^neid ' has found but too many admirers. His imitations 
of Lucian betray the grossest misconception of humorous effect, 
when he attempts to burlesque that which is ludicrous already. ' 
He was acquainted M'ith French and Italian ; and, among several ' 
works from the former language, translated * The Horace' of J 
Corneille, and Montaigne's ' Essays.' 

The father of Cotton is described by Lord Clarendon as an 
accomplished and honourable man, who was driven by domestic • 
afflictions to habits which rendered his age less reverenced than ^' 
his youth, and made his best friends wish that he had not livedo 
so long. From him our poet inherited an encumbered estate, ' 
with a disposition to extravagance little calculated to improve - 
it. After having studied at Cambridge, and returned from his '- 
travels abroad, he married the daughter of Sir Thomas Hut-i 
chinson, of Owthorp, in Nottinghamshire. He went to Ireland" 
as a captain in the army, but of his military progress nothing is' 
recorded. Having embraced the soldier's life merely as a shift 
in distress, he was not likely to pursue it with much ambition. ' 
It was probably in Ireland that he met with his second wife, ^ 
Mary, Countess Dowager of Ardglass, the widow of Lord"^- 
Cornwall. She had a jointure of 1500Z. a-year, secured from' 
his imprudent management. He died insolvent at Westminster. 
One of his favourite recreations was angling; and his house, 
which was situated on the Dove, a fine trout-stream which divides 
the counties of Derby and Stafford, was the frequent resort of » 
his friend Izaak Walton. There he built a fishing-house, " Pis^^ 
catoribus sacrum," with the initials of honest Izaak's name and'^ 
his own united in ciphers over the door. The walls were painted* 
with fishing scenes, and the portraits of Cotton and Walton were 
upon the beaufet. 

DR. HENRY MORE. 

[Born, 1614. Died, 1687.] 

Dr. Henry More was the son of a respectable gentleman at 
Grantham, in Lincolnshire. He spent the better part of a long 
and intensely studious life at Cambridge, refusing even the masr{ 
tership of his college, and several offers of preferment in the. 
church, for the sake of unbroken leisure and retirement. In 



MORE— ETHEREGE. 245 



1640 he composed his ' Psychozoia, or Life of the Sou]/ which 
he afterwards republished with other pieces in a volume entitled 
' Philosophical Poems.' Before the appearance of the former 
work he had studied the Platonic writers and mystic divines, till 
his frame had become emaciated, and his faculties had been 
strained to such enthusiasm, that he began to talk of holding- 
supernatural communications, and imagined that Jiis body exhaled 
the perfume of violets. With the exception of these innocent 
reveries, his life and literary character were highly respectable. 
He corresponded with Des Cartes, was the friend of Cud worth, 
and, as a divine and moralist, was not only popular in his own 
time, but has been mentioned with admiration both by Addison 
and Blair. In the heat of rebellion he was spared even by the 
fanatics, who, though he refused to take the Covenant, left him 
to dream with Plato in his academic bower. As a poet he has 
woven together a singular texture of Gothic fancy and Greek 
philosophy, and made the Christiano-Platonic system of meta- 
physics a groundwork for the fables of the nursery. His versi- 
fication, though he tells us that he was won to the Muses in his 
childhood by the melody of Spenser, is but a faint echo of the 
Spenserian tune. In fancy he is dark and lethargic. Yet his 
'Psychozoia' is not a commonplace production ; a certain so- 
lemnity and earnestness in his tone leaves an impression that he 
^^ believed the magic wonders which he sung."* His poetry is 
not, indeed, like a beautiful landscape on which the eye can 
repose, but may be compared to some curious grotto, whose 
gloomy labyrinths we might be curious to explore for the strange 
and mystic associations they excite. 



GEORGE ETHEREGE. 

[Born, 1636. Died, 1694?] 
George Etherege first distinguished himself among the liber- 
tine wits of the age by his * Comical Revenge, or Love in a 
Tub.' He afterwards gained a more deserved distinction in the 
comic drama by his ' Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter,' a 
character which has been the model of all succeeding stage 
pfetits-maitres. 
I * [Collins.] 



246 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



NATHANIEL LEE. 

[Died, 1692.*] 

Many of the Bedlam witticisms of this unfortunate man have 
been recorded by those who can derive mirth from the most hu- 
miliating- shape of human calamity. His rant and turgidity as a 
\vriter are proverbial; but those who have witnessed justice done 
to the acting of his ' Theodosius ' must have felt that he had some 
powers in the pathetic. He was the son of a clergyman in Hert- 
fordshire. He was bred at TTestminster, under Dr. Busby, and 
became a scholar on the foundation at Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge. From thence he came to London, and attempted the 
profession of an actor. The part which he performed was 
Duncan, in Sir William Davenant's alteration of 'Macbeth.' 
He was completely unsuccessful. "Yet Lee," says Cibber, 
'* was so pathetic a reader of his own scenes, that I have been 
informed by an actor who was present, that, while Lee was read- 
ing to Major Mohun, at a rehearsal, Mohun, in the warmth of 
his admiration, threw down his part, and said, * Unless I were 
able to play it as well as you read it, to what purpose should 1 
undertake it V And yet," continues the laureate, " this very 
author, whose elocution raised such admiration in so capital an 
actor, when he attempted to be an actor himself, soon quitted the 
stage in an honest despair of ever making any profitable figure 
there." Failing in this object, he became a writer for the stage, 
and his first tragedy of * Nero,' which came out in 1675, was 
favourably received. In the nine subsequent years of his life he 
produced as many plays of his own, and assisted Dryden in two; 
at the end of which period an hereditary taint of madness, aggra- 
vated by habits of dissipation, obliged him to be confined for 
four years to the receptacle at Bethlehem. He recovered the 
use of his faculties so far as to corppose two pieces — 'The 
Princess of Cleves,' and ' The Massacre of Paris ;' but with all 
the profits of his invention his circumstances were so reduced 
that a weekly stipend of ten shillings was his principal support 

* ["6 April 1692, Nathaniell Lee a man bur.'" — Burial Register of St. 

Clement Danes. The period of Lee's decease has not been hitherto ascer- 
tained.] 



LEE-SHADWELL— VAUGHAN-POMFRET. 247 

I towards the close of his life, and to the last he was not free from 

! occasional derangement. 

♦ 

THOMAS SHADWELL. 

[Bom, 1640. Died, 1692.1 

i Thomas Shadwell, the laureate of William III., and the Mac 

j Flecknoe of Dry den, was born 1640, and died 1692. Rochester 

j said of him, that if he had burnt all he wrote, and printed all he 

I spoke, he would have had more wit and humour than any other 

I poet. He left seventeen plays, besides other poems.* 



HENRY VAUGHAN. 

[Born, 1621. Died, 1695.] 

Henry Vaughan was a Welsh gentleman, born on the banks of 
the Uske, in Brecknockshire, who was bred to the law, but relin- 
quished it for the profession of physic. He is one of the harshest 
even of the inferior order of the school of conceit ; but he has 
fome few scattered thoughts that meet our eye amidst his harsh 
pages, like wild flowers on a barren heath. 



JOHN POMFRET. 

[Born, 16G7. Died, 1703.] 

John Pomfret was minister of Maiden, in Bedfordshire. He 
died of the small-pox in his thirty-sixth year. It is asked, in 
Mr. Southey's ' Specimens of English Poetry,' why Pomfret's 
' Choice ' is the most popular poem in the English language : it 
might have been demanded, with equal propriety, why London 
Bridge is built of Parian marble, f 

J . * [Nahum Tate, of all my predecessors, must have ranked the lowest of 
tike laureates, if he had not succeeded Shadwell. — Southey's Life of Cowpery 
vol. ii. p. 112. This is very unjust: Shad well's plays are among the best of 
the Charles II. period of our drama.] 

t [Why is Pomfret the most popular of the English poets ? The fact 
is certain, and the solution would be useful. — Southey's Specimens, vol. i. 
p. 91. 

Pomfret's ' Choice' exhibits a system of life adapted to common notions. 



248 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



THOMAS BROWN. 

[Died, 1704.] 
Thomas, usually called Tom Brown, was the son of a farmer at 
Shipnel, in Shropshire — was for some time a schoolmaster at 
Kingston-upon-Thames, but left the ungenial vocation for the 
life of a wit and author, in London. He was a good linguist, 
and seems to have rather wasted than wanted talent. 



CHARLES SACKVILLE, EARL OF DORSET. 

[Born, 1637. Died, 1706.] 
The point and sprightliness of Dorset's pieces entitle him to some 
remembrance, though they leave not a slender apology for the 
grovelling adulation that was shown to him by Dryden in his 
dedications. 



GEORGE STEPNEY. 

[Born, 1663. Died, 1707.] 

George Stepney was the youthful friend of Montague Earl of 
Halifax, and owed his preferments to that nobleman. It appears, 
from his verses on the burning of Monmouth's picture, that his 
first attachment was to the Tory interest, but he left them in suf- 
ficient time to be rewarded as a partisan by the Whigs, and was 
nominated to several foreign embassies. As a poet, Dr. Johnson 
justly characterizes him as equally deficient in the grace of wif 
and the vigrour of nature. 



o 



JOHN PHILIPS. 

[Born, 1676. Died, 1708.] 

The fame of this poet (says the grave doctor of the last century) 

will endure as long as Blenheim is remembered or cider drunk 

and equal to common expectations ; such a state as aifords plenty and txao' 
quillity, without exclusion of intellectual pleasures. Perhaps no composition 
in our language has been oftener perused than Pomfret's ' Choice.' — Johnson. 
Johnson and Southey have -written of what was ; Mr. Campbell of what 
is. Pomfret's ' Choice'is certainly not now perused oftener than any other 
composition in our language, nor is Pomfret now the most popular of 
English poets.] 



T. BROWN— SACKVILLE— STEPNEY— J. PHILIPS— WALSH. 249 

in England. He might have added, as long as tobacco shall be 
smoked : for Philips has written more meritoriously about the 
Indian weed than about his native apple ; and his Muse appears 
to be more in her element amidst the smoke of the pipe than of 
the battle. 

His father was Archdeacon of Salop, and minister of Bampton, 
in Oxfordshire, where the poet was born. He was educated at 
Winchester, and afterwards at Cambridge. He intended to have 
followed the profession of physic, and delighted in the study of 
natural history, but seems to have relinquished scientific pursuits 
when the reputation of his ' Splendid Shilling,' about the year 
1703, introduced him to the patronage of Bolingbroke, at whose 
request, and in whose house, he wrote his poem on ' The Battle of 
Blenheim.' This, like his succeeding poem on ' Cider,' was 
extravagantly praised. Philips had the merit of studying and 
admiring Milton, but he never could imitate him without ludi- 
crous effect, either in jest or earnest. His ' Splendid Shilling ' is 
the earliest and one of the best of our parodies ; but ' Blenheim ' 
is as completely a burlesque upon Milton as ' The Splendid 
Shilling,' though it was written and read with gravity. In 
describing his hero, Marlborough, stepping out of Queen Anne's 
drawing-room, he unconsciously carries the mock heroic to per- 
fection, when he says — 

*' His plumy crest 
Nods horrible. With more terrific port 
^ He walks, and seems already in the fight/' 

^et such are the fluctuations of taste, that contemporary criti- 
icism bowed with solemn admiration over his Miltonic cadences. 
He was meditating a still more formidable poem on the Day of 
Judgment, when his life was prematurely terminated by a con- 
sumption. 

> 

WILLIAM WALSH. 

^y- [Born, 1663. Died, 1709.] 

"William Walsh was knight for his native county, Worcester- 
shire, in several parliaments, and gentleman of the horse to 
Queen Anne, under the Duke of Somerset. Though a friend to 
the Revolution, he was kind to Dryden, who praised him, as 
Pope must have done, merely from the motive of personal grati- 



250 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

tude ; for, except his encouragement of the early genius of Pope, 
he seems to have no claim to remembrance.* 



THOMAS PARNELL. 

[Born, 1679. Died, 1717?] 

The compass of Parnell's poetry is not extensive, but its tone is 
peculiarly delightful — not from mere correctness of expr^sion, 
to which some critics have stinted its praises, but from the graceful 
and reserved sensibility that accompanied his polished phraseology. 
The curiosa felicitas^ the studied happiness of his diction, does 
not spoil its simplicity. His poetry is like a flower that has 
been trained and planted by the skill of the gardener, but which 
preserves, in its cultured state, the natural fragrance of its 
wilder air. 

His ancestors were of Congleton, in Cheshire. His father, 
who had been attached to the republican party in the civil wars, 
went to Ireland at the Restoration, and left an estate which he 
purchased in that kingdom, together with another in Cheshire, 
at his death, to the poet. Parnell was educated at the Univer- 
sity of Dublin, and having been permitted, by a dispensation, to 
take deacon's orders under the canonical age, had the arch* 
deaconry of Clogher conferred upon liim by the Bishop of that 
diocese, in his twenty-sixth year. About the same time he 
married a Miss Anne Minchin, an amiable woman, whose death 
he had to lament not many years after their union, and whose 
loss, 35 it affected Parnell, even the iron-hearted Swift mentions 
as a heavy misfortune. 

Though born and bred in Ireland, he seems to have had too 
little of the Irishman in his local attachments. His aversion to 
the manners of his native country was more fastidious tha^ 
amiable. When he had once visited London, he became attached 
to it for ever. His zest or talents for society made him the 
favourite of its brightest literary circles. His pulpit oratory 
was also much admired in the metropolis ; and he renewed his 
visits to it every year. This, however, was only the bright side 

* [All we know of Walsh is his ' Ode to King William,' and Pope's epithet 
of " knowing Walsh.'' — Byron.] 



PARNELL-GARTH. 251 



of his existence. His spirits were very unequal, and, when he 
found them ebbing, he used to retreat to the solitudes of Ireland, 
where he fed the disease of his imagination by frightful descrip- 
tions of his retirement. During his intimacy with the Whigs in 
England, he contributed some papers, chiefly ' Visions,' to the 
* Spectator ' and ' Guardian.' Afterwards his personal friendship 
was engrossed by the Tories, and they persuaded him to come 
over to their side in politics, at the suspicious moment when the 
Whigs were going out of power. In the frolics of the Scriblerus 
Club, of which he is said to have been the founder, wherever 
literary allusions were required for the ridicule of pedantry, he 
may be supposed to have been the scholar most able to supply 
them ; for Pope's correspondence shows that among his learned 
friends he applied to none with so much anxiety as to Parnell. 
The death of the Queen put an end to his hopes of preferment 
by the Tories, though not before he had obtained, through the 
influence of Swift, the vicarage of Finglass, in the diocese of 
Dublin. His fits of despondency, after the death of his wife, 
became more gloomy, and these aggravated a habit of intem- 
perance which shortened his days. He died, in his thirty -eighth 
year, at Chester, on his way to Ireland,* and he was buried in 
Trinity church, in that city, but without a memorial to mark 
the spot of his interment. 



SAMUEL GARTH. 

'" [Died, 1718.] 

Samuel Garth was an eminent physician, an accomplished 
scholar, and a benevolent man. No feuds, either in politics or 
literature, estranged him from literary merit where he found it. 
He was an early encourager of Pope, and at the same time the 
friend of Addison and Granville ; a zealous Whig, but the warm 
admirer of Dryden, whose funeral oration he pronounced. His 
*^i)ispensary ' was written from a more honourable motive than 
satire generally possesses, viz. the promotion of charity, being 
intended to ridicule the selfishness of the apothecaries, and of 

* [He is said to have died in 1717 ; but in the parish register the entry of 
his burial is the 18th of October, 1718.— See Goldsmith's Misc. Works, by 
Prior, vol. iv. p. 512.] 



252 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

some of the faculty, who opposed an institution that was meant 
to furnish the poor with medicines gratuitously. It is an ob- 
vious imitation of the ' Lutrin/ Warton blames the poet for 
making the fury, Disease, talk like a critic. It is certain, how- 
ever, that criticism is often a disease, and can sometimes talk 
like a fury. 

" — » 

PETER ANTHONY MOTTEUX. 

[Born, 1660. Died, 1718.] 

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes brought over many inge- 
nious artists to this country from France ; but we should hardly 
have expected an increase to our poets among them : yet Peter 
Anthony Motteux, who was born and educated at Rouen in 
Normandy, was driven to England by the event of that persecu- 
tion, and acquired so much knowledge of the language as to 
write a good translation of ' Don Quixote,' and to become a 
successful writer in our drama. But his end was not so credit- 
able ; he was found dead in a disorderly house, in the parish of 
St. Clement Danes, and was supposed either to have been mur- 
dered, or to have met with his death from trying an experiment 
which is not fit to be repeated. He established himself respect- 
ably in trade, and had a good situation in the post-office. 



MATTHEW PRIOR. 

[Born, 1666. Died 1721.] 

Prior was one of the last of the race of poets who relied for 
ornament on scholastic allusion and pagan machinery ; but he 
used them like Swift, more in jest than earnest, and with good 
effect.* In his * Alma' he contrives even to clothe metaphysics 

* [Prior's fictions are mythological. Venus, after the example of the 
Greek epigram, asks when she was seen naked and bathing. Then Cupid is 
mistaken; then Cupid is disarmed; then he loses his darts to Ganymede; 
then Jupiter sends him a summons by Merciiri/. Then Chloe goes a hunt>- 
ing with an ivory quiver graceful at her side ; Diana mistakes her for one 
of her nymphs, and Cupid laughs at the blunder. All this is surely despi- 
cable. — Johnson. 

" When Prior wrote, Venus and Cupid were not so obsolete as now. His 
contemporary writers, and some that succeeded him, did not think them 



MOTTEUX— PRIOR— SEWELL—VANBRUGH. 253 

jl^.the gay and colloquial pleasantry wliich is the characteristic 

G^arm of his manner.* 

■ ' ♦ 

DE, GEORGE SEWELL. 

[Died, Feb. 8, 1726.] 
Dr. George Sewell, author of ' Sir Walter Raleigh,' a 
tragedy ; several papers in the fifth volume of ' The Tatler,' and 
ninth of ' The Spectator ;' a ' Life of John Philips ;' and some other 
things. There is something melancholy in this poor man's 
history. He was a physician at Hampstead, with very little 
practice, and chiefly subsisted on the invitations of the neigh- 
bouring gentlemen, to whom his amiable character made him 
acceptable ; but at his death not a friend or relative came to 
commit his remains to the dust ! He was buried in the meanest 
manner, under a hollow tree, that m as once part of the boundary 
of the churchyard of Hampstead. No memorial was placed 
over his remains. 



SIR JOHN VANBRUGH. 

[Born, 1666. Died, 1726.] 

Sir John Yanbrugh,*!* the poet and architect, was the oldest 

beneath their notice. Tibullus, in reality, disbelieved their existence as 
much as we do ; yet Tibullus is allowed to be the prince of all poetical in- 
namoratos, though he mentions them in almost every page. There is a 
fashion in these things, which the Doctor seems to have forgotten." — Cow- 
per, Letter to Univin, January 5th, 1782.] 

*[What Prior meant by his ' Alma' I cannot understand ; by the Greek 
motto to it one would think it was either to laugh at the subject or his reader. 
There are some parts of it very fine ; and let them save the badness of the 
jcest. — Goldsmith. 

^' What suggested to Johnson the thought that the * Alma" was written in 
Htiitation of ' Hudibras ' I cannot conceive. In former years they were both 
favourites of mine, and I often read them ; but I never saw in them the 
least resemblance to each other ; nor do I now, except that they are com- 
posed in verse of the same measure. — Cowper, Letter to Unwin, March 21st, 
pM.] 

, t The family of Sir John Vanbrugh is stated, in the * Biographia Drama- 
Idea/ to have come originally from France ; but my friend, the Kev. George 
vanbrugh, rector of Aughton, in Lancashire, the only surviving descendant 
of the family, informs me that his ancestors were eminent merchants of 
Antwerp, and fled out of Flanders when the Duke of Alva tried to establish 
the Inquisition in those provinces. They first took refuge in Holland, and 
from thence came over to England to enjoy the Protestant protection of 
Queen Elizabeth. 



254 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

son of Mr. Giles Yanbrugh of London, merchant; he was born 
in the parish of St. Stephen's, Walbrook, 1666. He received a 
very liberal education, and at the age of nineteen was sent by 
his father to France, where he continued several years. In 1703 
he was appointed Clarencieux king of arms, and in 1706 was 
commissioned by Queen Anne to carry the habit and ensigns of 
the order of the Garter to King George I., then at Hanover, 
He was also made comptroller-general of the board of works, and 
surveyor of the gardens and waters. In 1714 lie received the order 
of knighthood, and in 1719 married Henrietta Maria, daughter of 
Colonel Yarborough. Sir John died of a .quinsy at his house 
in Scotland -yard, and is interred in the family vault under the 
church of St. Stephen, Walbrook. He left only one son, who 
fell at the battle of Fontenoy. 



ELIJAH FENTON. 

[Born, 1683. Died, 1730.] 

Elijah Fenton was obliged to leave the university on account 
of his nonjuring principles. He was for some time secretarj^ to 
Charles Earl of Orrery : he afterwards taught the grammar- 
school of Sevenoaks, in Kent; but was induced by Bolingbroke 
to forsake that drudgery for the more unprofitable state of 
dependence upon a political patron, who, after all, left him dis- 
appointed and in debt. Pope recommended him to Craggs as a 
literajy instructor, but the death of that statesman again sub- 
verted his hopes of preferment ; and he became an auxiliary to 
Pope in translating the ' Odyssey,' of which his share was the first, 
fourth, nineteenth, and twentieth books. The successful appear- 
ance of his tragedy of Mariamne ' on the stage, in 1723, relieved^ 
him from his difficulties, and the rest of his life was comfortably 
spent in the employment of Lady Trumbull, first as tutor to her 
son, and afterwards as auditor of her accounts. His character 
was that of an amiable but indolent man, who drank, in his greati 
chair, two bottles of port wine a day. He published an edition^ 
of the poetical works of Milton and of TTaller.* 

* [Fenton wrote nothing equal to his ' Ode to the Lord Gower,' which isr 
written, says Joseph Warton, in the true spirit of lyric poetry. It has re*> 
ceived too the praises of Pope and of Akenside, but is better in parts than 
as a whole,] 



FENTON— WARD— GAY. 255 

EDWARD WARD. 

[Born, 1667. Died, 1731.] 

I pDWARD (familiarly called Ned) Ward was a low-born, un- 
educated man, who followed the trade of a publican. He is said, 
however, to have attracted many eminent persons to his house 
by his colloquial powers as a landlord, to have had a general 
acquaintance among authors, and to have been a great retailer 
of literary anecdotes. In those times the tavern was a less dis- 
creditable haunt than at present, and his literary acquaintance 
might probably be extensive. Jacob offended him very much 
by saying, in his account of the poets, that he kept a public-house 
in the city. He publicly contradicted the assertion as a false- 
hood, stating that his house was not in the city, but in Moor- 
fields. Ten thick volumes attest the industry, or cacoethes, of 
this facetious publican, who wrote his very will in verse. His 
favourite measure is the Hudibrastic. His works give a com- 
plete picture of the mind of a vulgar but acute cockney. His 
sentiment is the pleasure of eating and drinking, and his wit and 
humour are equally gross ; but his descriptions are still curious 
and full of life, and are worth preserving, as delineations of the 
manners of the times. 



JOHN GAY. 

[Born, 1688. Died, 1732.] 

Gay's ' Pastorals ' are said to have taken with the public not as 
satires on those of Ambrose Philips, which ihey were meant to be, 
but as natural and just imitations of real life and of rural man- 
ners. It speaks little, however, for the sagacity of the poet's 
town readers, if they enjoyed those caricatures in earnest, or 
imagined any truth of English manners in Cuddy and Cloddipole 
contending with Amabaean verses for the prize or song, or in 
Bowzybeus rehearsing the laws of nature. If the allusion to 
PJiilips was overlooked, they could only be relished as travesties 
of Virgil, for Bowzybeus himself would not be laughable unless 
w'e recollected Silenus. 



256 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

Gay's ' Trivia ' seems to have been built upon the hint of 
Swift's ' Description of a City Shower.' It exhibits a picture 
of the familiar customs of the metropolis that will continue to 
become more amusing as the customs grow obsolete. As a 
fabulist he has been sometimes hypercritically blamed for pre- 
senting us with allegorical impersonations. The mere naked 
apologue of ^sop is too simple to interest the human mind 
when its fancy and understanding are past the state of childhood 
or barbarism. La Fontaine dresses the stories which he took 
from ^sop and others with such profusion of wit and naivete, 
that his manner conceals the insipidity of the matter. "Za sauce 
vaut mieux que le poisson.^' Gay, though not equal to La Fon- 
taine, is at least free from his occasional prolixity; and in one 
instance (' The Court of Death ') ventures into allegory with 
considerable power. Without being an absolute simpleton, like 
La Fontaine, he possessed a honliomie of character which forms 
an agreeable trait of resemblance between the fabulists.* 



MATTHEW GREEN. 

[Born, 1696. Died, 1737.] 

Matthew Green was educated among the dissenters ; but left : 

them in disgust at their precision, probably without reverting to ; 

the mother church. All that we are told of hira is, that he had i 

a post at the Customhouse, which he discharged with great r 

fidelity, and died at a lodging in Nag's- head -court, Gracechurch- ; 

street, aged forty-oncf His strong powers of mind had received : 

little advantage from education, and were occasionally subject to ' 

depression from hypochondria ; but his conversation is said to have i 

abounded in wit and shrewdness. One day his friend Sylvanus \ 

Be van complained to him that while he was bathing in the river he ' 
had been saluted by a waterman with the cry of '' Quaker Quirl." 

* [What can be prettier than Gay's ballad, or rather Swift's, ArbuthnotV ., 

Pope's, and Gay's, in the ' What-d'ye-call-it ' — "'Twas -when the seas were ' 
roaring ?" 1 have been well informed that they all contributed. — Cowper 
to Unwin, August 4th, 1 783.] 

f [He was a clerk in the Customhouse, on. it is thought, a small salary; ■ 

but the writer of this note has hunted over official books in vain for a notice j 

of his appointment, and of obituaries for the time of his death.] i 



GREEN— LILLO. 257 



! and wondered how he should have been known to be a Quaker 
I without his clothes. Green replied, ^' By your swimming against 
j the stream." 

His poem, ' The Spleen,' was never published in his lifetime. 

I Glover, his warm friend, presented [it to the world after his 

death ; and it is much to be regretted did not prefix any account 

of its interesting author. It was originally a very short copy 

of verses, and was gradually and piecemeal increased. Pope 

j speedily noticed its merit, Melmoth praised its strong originality 

I in Fitzosborne's Letters, and Gray duly commended it in his 

I correspondence with Walpole, when it appeared in Dodsley's 

i collection. In that walk of poetry, where Fancy aspires no 

farther than to go hand in hand with Common Sense, its merit is 

I certainly unrivalled.* 



GEORGE LILLQ. 

[Born, 1693. Died, 1.743.] 

George Lillo was the son of a Dutch jeweller, who married 
an Englishwoman, and settled in London. Our poet was born 
near Moorfields, was bred to his father's business, and followed 
it for many years. The story of his dying in distress was a 
fiction of Hammond, the poet; for he bequeathed a considerable 
property to his nephew, whom he made his heir. It has been 
said that this bequest was in consequence of his finding the 
young man disposed to lend him a sum of money at a time when 
he thought proper to feign pecuniary distress, in order that he 
might discover the sincerity of those calling themselves his 
friends. Thomas Davies, his biographer and editor, professes 
to have got this anecdote from a surviving partner of Lillo. It 
bears, however, an intrinsic air of improbability. It is not usual 
for sensible tradesmen to affect being on the verge of bank- 
ruptcy, and Lillo's character was that of an uncommonly sen- 
sible man. Fielding, his intimate friend, ascribes to him a manly 
simplicity of mind, that is extremely unlike such a stratagem. 
.Lillo is the tragic poet of middling and familiar life. Instead 

* [There is a profusion of wit everywhere in Green ; reading would have 
fbrmed his judgment and harmonized his verse, for even his wood-notes often 
break out into strains of real poetry and music— Gray.] 



258 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

of heroes from romance and history, he gives the merchant and 
his apprentice ; and the Macbeth of his ' Fatal Curiosity ' is a 
private gentleman, who has been reduced by his poverty to dis- 
pose of his copy of Seneca for a morsel of bread. The mind 
will be apt, after reading his works, to suggest to itself the 
question, how far the graver drama would gain or lose by a 
more general adoption of this plebeian principle. The cares, 
it may be said, that are most familiar to our existence, and the 
distresses of those nearest to ourselves in situation, ought to lay 
the strongest hold upon our sympathies, and the general mass of 
society ought to furnish a more express image of man than any 
detached or elevated portion of the species. 

Lillo is certainly a master of potent effect in the exhibition 
of human suffering. His representation of actual or intended 
murder seems to assume a deeper terror from the familiar cir- 
cumstances of life with which it is invested. Such indeed is 
said to have been the effect of a scene in his ^ Arden of Fever- 
sham,* that the audience rose up with one accord and interrupted 
it. The anecdote, whether true or false, must recall to the mind 
of every one who has perused that piece the harrowing sympathy 
which it is calculated to excite. But, notwithstanding the power 
of Lillo's works, we entirely miss in them that romantic attrac- 
tion which invites to repeated perusal of them. They give us 
life in a close and dreadful semblance of reality, but not arrayed 
in the magic illusion of poetry. His strength lies in conception 
of situations, not in beauty of dialogue, or in the eloquence of ; 
the passions. Yet the effect of liis plain and homely subjects \ 
was so strikingly superior to that of the vapid and heroic pro- 
ductions of the day, as to induce some of his contemporary 
admirers to pronounce that he had reached the acme of dramatic ^ 
excellence, and struck into the best and most genuine path of , 
tragedy. * George Barnwell,' it was observed, drew more tears ; 
than the rants of Alexander. This might be true, but it did not 
bring the comparison of humble and heroic subjects to a fair test ; 
for the tragedy of ' Alexander * is bad, not from its subject, but 
from the incapacity of the poet who composed it. It does no: 
prove that heroes drawn from historj^ or romance are not at least 
as susceptible of high and poetical effect as a wicked apprentice, 
or a distressed gentleman pawning his moveables. It is one 



LILLO. 259 



question whether Lillo has given to his subjects from private life 
the degree of beauty of which they are susceptible. He is a 
master of terrific, but not of tender impressions. We feel a 
harshness and gloom in his genius even while we are compelled 
to admire its force and originality. 

The peculiar choice of his subjects was happy and commend- 
able as far as it regarded himself, for his talents never succeeded 
so well when he ventured out of them. But it is another question 
whether the familiar cast of those subjects was fitted to constitute 
a more genuine, or only a subordinate, walk in tragedy. Un- 
doubtedly the genuine delineation of the human heart will please 

I us, from whatever station or circumstances of life it is derived. 
In the simple pathos of tragedy probably very little difference 

I will be felt from the choice of characters being pitched above or 
below the line of mediocrity in station. But something more 
than pathos is required in tragedy ; and the very pain that attends 
our sympathy requires agreeable and romantic associations of 

' the fancy to be blended with its poignancy. Whatever attaches 

ideas of importance, publicity, and elevation to the object of pity, 

forms a brightening and alluring medium to the imagination. 

Athens herself, with all her simplicity and democracy, delighted 

on the stage to 

" let gorgeous Tragedy 
In sceptred pall come sweeping by." 

Even situations far depressed beneath the familiar mediocrity 

of life are more picturesque and poetical than its ordinary level. 

It is certainly on the virtues of the middling rank of life that 

the strength and comforts of society chiefly depend, in the same 

manner as we look for the harvest not on cliffs and precipices, 

but on the easy slope and the uniform plain. But the painter does 

i not in general fix on level countries for the subjects of his noblest 

I landscapes. There is an analogy, I conceive, to this in the moral 

i painting of tragedy. Disparities of station give it boldness of 

! outline. The commanding situations of life are its mountain 

I scenery — the region where its storm and sunshine may be por- 

' trayed in their strongest contrast and colouring. 



s2 



260 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

THOMAS TICKELL. 

[Born, 1686. Died, 1740.] 

Thomas Tickell, the son of the Rev. Richard Tickell, was 
born at Bridekirk, in Cumberland, studied at Oxford, and olf- 
tained a fellowship, which he vacated by marrying about his 
fortieth year. Though he sang the praises of peace when the 
Tories were negotiating with France, he seems, from the rest of 
his writings, and his close connexion with Addison, to have de- 
served the epithet of Whiggissimus, which Swift bestowed on 
him. His friendship with Addison lasted for life ; he accom- 
panied him to Ireland in the suite of Lord Sunderland, became 
his secretary when Addison was made secretary of state, was left 
the charge of publishing his works, and prefixed to them his ex- 
cellent Elegy.* He was afterwards secretary to the lords justices 
of Ireland, a place which he held till his death. 



ALEXANDER POPE. 

[Born, 1688. Died, 1744.] 

The faults of Pope*s private character have been industriously* 
exposed by his latest editor and biographer, f a gentleman whose 
talents and virtuous indignation were worthy of a better employ 
ment. In the moral portrait of Pope which he has drawn, all 
the agreeable traits of tender and faitliful attachment in his nature 
have been thrown into the shade, %vhile his deformities are brought 
out in the strongest, and sometimes exaggerated colours. 

* [This Elegy by Mr. Tickell is one of the finest in our language. There 
is so little new that can be said upon the death of a friend, after the com- 
plaints of Ovid and the Latin Italians in this way, that one is surprised to 
see so much novelty in this to strike us, and so much interest to affect- — 
Goldsmith. 

Through all Tickell's works there is a strain of ballad thinking, if I may 
so express it; and in this professed ballad ['Colin and Lucy'] he seems to 
have surpassed himself. It is, perhaps, the best in our language in this way. 
— Goldsmith. 

I always thought Tickell's ballad the prettiest in the world. — Gray to 
Walpole.] 

t [The Rev. W. L. Bowles : but Mr. William Roscoe is his latest editor 
and biographer.] 



TICKELL— POPE. 261 



-The story of his publishing a character of the Duchess of 
Marlborough, after having received a bribe to suppress it, rests 
on the sole authority of Horace Walpole : but Dr. J. Warton, 
in relating it, adds a circumstance which contradicts the state- 
ment itself. The duchess's imputed character appeared in 1 746, 
two years after Pope's death ; Pope, therefore, could not have 
himself published it ; and it is exceedingly improbable that the 
bribe ever existed.* Pope was a steady and fond friend. We 
shall be told, perhaps, of his treachery to Bolingbroke, in pub- 
lishing * The Patriot King.' An explanation of tliis business was 
given by the late Earl of Marchmont to a gentleman still living 
(1820), the Honourable George Rose, which is worth attending 
to. The Earl of Marchmont's account of it, first published by 
Mr. A. Chalmers in the ' Biographical Dictionary,' is the fol- 
lowing : — 

" The Essay on * The Patriot King ' was undertaken at the 
pressing instance of Lord Cornbury, very warmly supported by 
the earnest entreaties of Lord Marchmont, with which Lord Bo- 
lingbroke at length complied. When it was written it was shown 
to the two lords and one other confidential friend, who were so 
much pleased with it that they did not cease their importunities 
to have it published, till his lordship, after much hesitation, con- 
sented to print it, with a positive determination, however, against 
a publication at that time ; assigning as his reason, that the work 
was not finished • in such a way as he wished it to be before it 
went into the world. Conformably to that determination some 
copies of the essay were printed, which were distributed to Lord 
Cornbury, Lord Marchmont, Sir W. Wyndham, Mr. Lyttleton, 
Mr. Pope, and Lord Chesterfield. Mr. Pope put his copy into 
the hands of Mr. Allen, of Prior Park, near Bath, stating to him 
the injunction of Lord Bolingbroke ; but that gentleman was so 
captivated with it as to press Mr. Pope to allow him to print a 
small impression at his own expense, using such caution as 
should eflPectually prevent a single copy getting into the pos- 
session of any one till the consent of the author should be 
'^obtained. Under a solemn engagement to that effect, Mr. Pope 

* [That the bribe was paid, and the character in print, the publication of 
* The Marchmont Papers * since this was written has proved beyond all 
question.] 



262 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

very reluctantly consented : the edition was then printed, packed 
up, and deposited in a separate warehouse, of which Mr. Pope 
had the key. On the circumstance being made known to Lord 
Bolingbroke, who was then a guest in his own house at Battersea 
with Lord Marchmont, to whom he had lent it for two or three [ 
years, his lordship was in great indignation, to appease which 
Lord Marchmont sent Mr. Grevenkop (a German gentleman ] 
who had travelled with him, and was afterwards in the household ■ 
of Lord Chesterfield, when lord-lieutenant of Ireland) to bring J 
out the whole edition, of which a bonfire was instantly made on 
the terrace of Battersea." 



JAMES BRAMSTON. 

[Died, 1744.] 

I HAVE applied to many individuals for information respecting j 
the personal history of this writer, but have not been able to 
obtain it, even from the quarters where it was most likely to be ^, 
found. He was born, probably, about the year 1700; was of ' 
Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his degree of A.M. ; and ' 
was finally vicar of Harting, in Sussex. Besides ' The Man of • 
Taste,' he wrote a political satire entitled ' The Art of Politics,' 
and ' The Crooked Sixpence,' in imitation of Philips's ' Splendid J 
Shilling.' 



'O' 



WILLIAM MESTON. 

[Born, 1688. Died, 1745.] 

William Meston was born in the parish of Midmar, in Aber- 
deenshire. He received a » liberal education at the Marischal 
College of Aberdeen, and was for some time one of the teachers 
in tlie High School of that city. He removed from that situation 
to be preceptor to the young Earl of Marshal, and to his brother, 
who was afterwards the celebrated Marshal Keith, and by the 
interest of the family was appointed professor of philosophy in 
the Marischal College. On the breaking out of the rebellion of 
1715, he followed the fortunes of his misguided patrons, who 
made him governor of Dunotter Castle. After the battle of 
Sherriff-Muir, till the act of indemnity was passed, he lurked 



BRAMSTON—MESTON— BLAIR— THOMSON. 263 

with a few fugitive associates, for whose amusement he wrote 
several of the burlesque poems to which he gave the title of 
* Mother Grim's Tales.' Not being restored to his professorship, 
he lived for some time on the hospitality of the Countess of 
Marshal, and after her death established an academy successively 
at Elgin, Turiff, Montrose, and Perth, in all of which places he 
failed, apparently from habits of careless expense and conviviality. 
The Countess of Elgin supported him during the decline of his 
latter days, till he removed to Aberdeen, where he died of a 
languishing distemper. He is said to have been a man of wit 
and pleasantry in conversation, and of considerable attainments 
in classical and mathematical knowledge. 



ROBERT BLAIR. 

[Born, 1699. Died, 1746.] 

The eighteenth century has produced few specimens of blank 
verse of so powerful and simple a character as that of ' The 
Grave.' It is a popular poem, not merely because it is religious, 
but because its language and imagery are free, natural, and pic- 
turesque. The latest editor of the poets has, with singularly 
bad taste, noted some of this author's most nervous and expressive 
phrases as vulgarisms, among which he reckons that of friend- 
ship " the solder of society." Blair may be a homely and even 
a gloomy poet in the eye of fastidious criticism ; but there is a 
masculine and pronounced character even in his gloom and 
homeliness that keeps it most distinctly apart from either dul- 
Dess or vulgarity. His style pleases us like the powerful ex- 
pression of a countenance without regular beauty.* 



JAMES THOMSON. 

[Born, 1700. Died, 1748.] 

i^T is singular that a subject of such beautiful unity, divisibility, 
and progressive interest as the description of the year should not 

i, * [Blair's ' Grave " is the only poem I can call to mind which has been 
composed in imitation of the ' Night Thoughts.'— Southey, Life of CowpeVf 
vol. ii. p. 143.] 



264 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

have been appropriated by any poet before Thomson.* Mr. 
Twining, the translator of Aristotle's ' Poetics,' attributes the 
absence of poetry devoted to pure rural and picturesque descrip- 
tion among the ancients to the absence or imperfection of the 
art of landscape-painting. The Greeks, he observes, had no 
Thomsons because they had no Claudes. Undoubtedly, they 
were not blind to the beauties of natural scenery ; but their de- 
scriptions of rural objects are almost always what may be called 
sensual descriptions, exhibiting circumstances of corporeal de- 
light, such as breezes to fan the body, springs to cool the feet, 
grass to repose the limbs, or fruits to regale the taste and smell, 
rather than objects of contemplative pleasure to the eye and 
imagination. From the time of Augustus, when, according to 
Pliny, landscape -painting was first cultivated, picturesque images 
and descriptions of prospects seem to have become more common. 
But on the whole there is much more studied and detailed de- 
scription in modern than in ancient poetry. There is besides in 
Thomson a pure theism and a spirit of philanthropy, which, 
though not unknown to classic antiquity, was not familiar to its 
popular breast. The religion of the ancients was beautiful in 
fiction, but not in sentiment. It had revealed the most volup- 
tuous and terrific agencies to poetry, but had not taught her to 
contemplate nature as one great image of Divine benignity, or 
her creatures as the objects of comprehensive human sympatliy. 
Before popular poetry could assume this character, Christianity, 
philosophy, and freedom must have civilised the human uiind. 

Habits of early admiration teach us all to look back upon this 
poet as the favourite companion of our solitary walks, and as the 
author who has first or chiefly reflected back to our minds a 

* Even Thomson's extension of bis subject to the -whole year seems to 
have been an after-thought, as he began with the last of the seasons. It is 
said ** that he conceived the first design of his/ Winter ' from a poem on the 
same subject by a Mr. Rickleton. — Vide the * Censura Literaria,' vol. ii., 
where there is an amusing extract from the first and second editions of Thom- 
son's ' Winter.' 1 have seen an English poem, entitled ' The Seasons,' which 
was published earlier (I think) than those of Thomson ; but it is so insigni- 
ficant that it may be doubted if Thomson ever heard of it. 



* [He tells us so himself in one of his early letters. — See Memoir of Thom- 
son in * Aldine Poets,' p. xvii. The recovery of Rickleton's poem would be 
an addition to our poetry, for Thomson speaks of its many masterly strokes.] 



d 



THOMSON, 265 



heig-htened and refined sensation of the delight which rural 
scenery affords us. The judgment of cooler years may somewhat 
abate our estimation of him, though it will still leave us the 
essential features of his poetical character to abide the test of 
reflection. The unvaried pomp of his diction suggests a most 
unfavourable comparison with the manly and idiomatic simplicity 
of Cowper ; at the same time the pervading spirit and feeling of 
his poetry is in general more bland and delightful than that of 
his great rival in rural description. Thomson seems to contem- 
plate the creation with an eye of unqualified pleasure and ecstasy, 
and to love its inhabitants with a lofty and hallowed feeling of 
religious happiness ; Cowper has also his philanthropy, but it is 
dashed with religious terrors, and with themes of satire, regret, 
and reprehension. Cowper's image of nature is more curiously 
distinct and familiar : Thomson carries our associations through 
a wider circuit of speculation and sympathy ; his touches cannot 
be more faithful than Cowper's, but they are more soft and select, 
and less disturbed by the intrusion of homely objects. Cowper 
was certainly much indebted to him ; and though he elevates his 
style with more reserve and judgment than his predecessor, yet 
in his highest moments he seems to retain an imitative remem- 
brance of him.* It is almost stale to remark the beauties of a 
poem so universally felt — the truth and genial interest with which 

* [Thomson was admirable in description ; but it always seemed to me 
that there was somewhat of affectation in his style, and that his numbers are 
sometimes not well harmonised. I could wish too, with Dr. Johnson, that 
he had confined himself to this country ; for when he describes what he 
never saw, one is forced to read him with some allowances for possible mis- 
representation. He was, however, a true poet, and his lasting fame has 
proved it. — Cowper, Letter to Mrs. King, June 19th, 1788. 

Thomson was an honour to his country and to mankind, and a man to 
whose writings I am under very particular obligations ; for if I have any 
true relish for the beauties of nature, I may say with truth , that it was from 
Virgil and from Thomson that I caught it. — Beattie. 

The love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion ; and 
a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature. The one would 
carry his fellow-men along with him into nature, the other flies to nature 
from his fellow-men. In chastity of diction however, and the harmony of 
blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably ijelow him ; yet I still 
feel the latter to have been the born poet. — Coleridge, 

Thomson's genius does not so often delight us by exquisite minute touches 
in the description of nature as that of Cowper. It loves to paint on a great 
scale, and to dash objects off sweepingly by bold strokes. Cowper sets 
nature before your eyes — Thomson before your imagination. — Professor 
Wilson.] 



266 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

he carries us through the life of the year ; the harmony of suc- 
cession which he gives to the casual phenomena of nature ; his 
pleasing transition from native to foreign scenery ; and the soul 
of exalted and unfeigned benevolence which accompanies his 
prospects of the creation. It is but equal justice to say, that 
amidst the feeling and fancy of ' The Seasons ' we meet with in- 
terruptions of declamation, heavy narrative, and unhappy digres- 
sion — with a parhelion eloquence that throws a counterfeit glow 
of expression on commonplace ideas — as when he treats us to the 
solemnly ridiculous bathing of Musidora; or draws from the 
classics instead of nature ; or, after invoking Inspiration from 
her hermit-seat, makes his dedicatory bow to a patronising coun- 
tess, or speaker of the House of Commons.* As long as he 
dwells in the pure contemplation of nature, and appeals to the 
universal poetry of the human breast, his redundant style comes 
to us as something venial and adventitious — it is the flowing 
vesture of the Druid ; and perhaps to the general experience is 
rather imposing: but when he returns to the familiar narrations 
or courtesies of life, the same diction ceases to seem the mantle 
of inspiration, and only strikes us by its unwieldy difference from 
the common costume of expression. Between the period of his 
composing ' The Seasons ' and * The Castle of Indolence ' he 
wrote several works, which seem hardly to accord with the im- 
provement and maturity of his taste exhibited in the latter pro- 
duction. To * The Castle of Indolence ' he brought not only 
the full nature but the perfect art of a poet. The materials of 
that exquisite poem are derived originally from Tasso; but he 
was more immediately indebted for them to * The Fairy Queen :' 
and in meeting with the paternal spirit of Spenser he seems as if 
he were admitted more intimately to the home of inspiration.'!' 

* [This is too true ; but Thomson, we learn from Smollett, intended, had 
he lived, to have withdrawn the whole of these dedications — not from their 
poetic impropriety, however, but from the ingratitude of his patrons. To 
' The Castle of Indolence,' his latest, chastest, but not his best work, there is 
no dedication.") 

t [He had slight obligations also to Alexander Barclay's * Castle of Labour,' 
and to a poem of Mitchell's on ' Indolence,' Mhich, with his own lazy way 
of life, gave occasion to this delightful allegorical poem, in which the man- 
ner he professed to imitate is perhaps the most perfect without servility ever 
made of any author. There is no imitation of Spenser to approach it in 
genius and in manner. Gilbert West has Spenser's style, and his styl« 
only.] 



WATTS— A. PHILIPS. 267 



There lie redeemed the jejune ambition of his style, and retained 
all its wealth and luxury without the accompaniment of osten- 
tation. Every stanza of that charming allegory, at least of the 
whole of the first part of it, gives out a group of images from 
which the mind is reluctant to part, and a flow of harmony which 
the ear wishes to hear repeated. 



ISAAC WATTS. 

[Born, 1674. Died, 1748.] 

Dr. Watts's devotional poetry was for the most part intention- 
ally lowered to the understanding of children. If this was a 
sacrifice of taste, it was at least made to the best of intentions. 
The sense and sincerity of his prose writings, the excellent method 
in which he attempted to connect the study of ancient logic with 
common sense, and the conciliatory manner in which he allures 
the youthful mind to habits of study and reflection, are probably 
remembered with gratitude by nine men out of ten who have 
had proper books put into their hands at an early period of their 
education. Of this description was not poor old Percival Stock- 
dale, who in one of his lucubrations gives our author the appel- 
lation of " Mother Watts/' The nickname would not be worth 
mentioning if it did not suggest a compassionate reflection on the 
difference between the useful life and labours of Dr. Watts and 
the utterly useless and wasted existence of Percival Stockdale. 
It might have been happy for the frail intellects of that unfor- 
tunate man if they had been braced and rectified in his youth by 
such works as Watts's ' Logic and Improvement of the Mind.' 
the study of them might possibly have saved even him from a 
life of vanity, vexation, and oblivion. 



AMBROSE PHILIPS. 

[Born, 1671. Died, 1749.] 
Ambrose Philips, the pastoral rival of Pope, was educated at 
Cambridge, and distinguished for many years in London as a 
member of clubs witty and political, and as a writer for the 
Whigs. The best of his dramatic writings is ^ The Distressed 



268 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



Mother,' a translation of Racine's ^ Andromache.' His two other 
tragedies, ' The Briton ' and ' Humphrey Duke of Gloucester,' are 
not much better than his Pastorals. 



LEONARD WELSTED. 

[Born, 1688. Died, 1746-7.] 

Leonard Welsted, a victim of Pope's satire, whose verses did 
not always deserve it. 



AMHURST SELDEN. 

Of the history of this author I am sorry that I can give no ac- 
count. His poem of ' Love and Folly ' was published in April, 
1749. It seemed to me to be somewhat better than that which 
is generally condemned to oblivion. 



AARON HILL 

Was born in 1685, and died in the very minute of the earthquake 
of 1750, of the shock of which, though speechless, he appeared 
to be sensible. His life was active, benevolent, and useful : he 
was the general friend of unfortunate genius, and his schemes for 
public utility were frustrated only by the narrowness of his cir- 
cumstances. Though his manners were unassuming, his personal 
dignity was such that he made Pope fairly ashamed of the attempt 
to insult him, and obliged the satirist to apologise to him with a 

mean equivocation. 

< 

WILLIAM HAMILTON. 

[Born, 1704. Died, 1754.] 

William Hamilton, of Bangour, was of an ancient family in 
Ayrshire. He was liberally educated, and liis genius and delicate 
constitution seemed to mark him out for pacific pursuits alone ; 
but he thought fit to join the standard of rebellion in 1745, cele- 
brated the momentary blaze of its success in an ode on the battle 
of Gladsmuir, and finally escaped to France, after much wander- 



WELSTED—SELDEN— HILL— HAMILTON— COLLINS. 269 

ing and many hardships in the Highlands. He made his peace, 
however, with the government, and came home to take possession 
of his paternal estate ; but the state of his health requiring a 
warmer climate, he returned to the Continent, where he con- 
tinued to reside till a slow consumption carried him off at Lyons, 
in his fiftieth year. 

The praise of elegance is all that can be given to his verses. 
In case any reader should be immoderately touched with sym- 
pathy for his love sufferings, it is proper to inform him that 
Hamilton was thought by the fair ones of his day to be a very 
inconstant swain. A Scotch lady, whom he teased with his ad- 
dresses, applied to Home, the author of Douglas, for advice how 
to get rid of them. Home advised her to affect to favour his 
assiduities. She did so, and they were immediately withdrawn.* 



WILLIAM COLLINS. 

[Born, 1720. Died, 1759.] 

Collins published his ^ Oriental Eclogues ' while at college, and 

his lyrical poetry at the age of twenty-six. Those works will 

abide comparison with whatever Milton wrote under the age of 

thirty. If they have rather less exuberant wealth of genius, they 

exhibit more exquisite touches of pathos. Like Milton, he leads 

us into the haunted ground of imagination ; like him, he has the 

rich economy of expression haloed with thought, which by single 

or few words often hints entire pictures to the imagination. In 

what short and simple terms, for instance, does he open a wide 

and majestic landscape to the mind, such as we might view from 

Benlomond or Snowdon, when he speaks of the hut 

" That from the mountain's side 
Views wilds and swelling floods !" 

And in the line " Where faint and sickly winds for ever howl 
around," he does not merely seem to describe the sultry desert, 
but brings it home to the senses. 

A cloud of obscurity sometimes rests on his highest concep- 
tions, arising from the fineness of his associations, and the daring 
sweep of his allusions ; but the shadow is transitory, and inter- 

* [It has not hitherto been noticed that the first translation from Homer 
in blank verse was made by Hamilton.] 



270 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



feres very little with the light of his imagery, or the warmth of 
his feelings. The absence of even this speck of mysticism from 
his ' Ode on the Passions ' is perhaps the happy circumstance 
that secured its unbounded popularity. Nothing is common- 
place in Collins. The pastoral eclogue, which is insipid in all 
other English hands, assumes in Ids a touching interest and a 
picturesque air of novelty. It seems that he himself ultimately 
undervalued those eclogues, as deficient in characteristic man- 
ners ; but surely no just reader of them cares any more about 
this circumstance tlian about the authenticity of the tale of Troy. 
In his ' Ode to Fear ' he hints at his dramatic ambition, and 
he planned several tragedies. Had he lived to enjoy and adorn 
existence, it is not easy to conceive his sensitive spirit and har- 
monious ear descending to mediocrity in any path of poetry ; yet 
it may be doubted if his mind had not a passion for the visionary 
and remote forms of imagination too strong and exclusive for the 
general purposes of the drama. His genius loved to breathe 
rather in the preternatural and ideal element of poetry than in 
the atmosphere of imitation, which lies closest to real life ; and 
his notions of poetical excellence, whatever vows he might 
address to the manners, were still tending to the vast, the unde- 
finable, and the abstract. Certainly, however, he carried sensi- 
bility and tenderness into the highest regions of abstracted 
thought : his enthusiasm spreads a glow even amongst '*' the 
shadowy tribes of mind," and his allegory is as sensible to the 
heart as it is visible to the fancy. 



EDWARD MOORE. 

[Born, 1712. Died, 1757.] 

Edward Moore was the son of a dissenting clergyman at 
Abingdon, in Berkshire, and was bred to the business of a linen- 
draper, which he pursued, however, both in London and Ireland, 
with so little success that he embraced the literary life (accord- 
ing to his own account) more from necessity than inclination. 
His 'Fables' (in 1744) first brought him into notice. The 
Right Honourable Mr. Pel ham was one of his earliest friends ; 
and his ' Trial of Selim ' gained him the friendship of Lord 



MOORE— DYER— RAMSAY. 271 

Lyttelton. Of three works which he produced for the stage, his 
two comedies, ' The Foundling ' and ' Gil Bias/ were unsuccess- 
ful ; but he was fully indemnified by the profits and reputation of 
* The Gamester/ Moore himself acknowledges that he owed to 
Garrick many popular passages of his drama ; and Davies, the 
biographer of Garrick, ascribes to the great actor the whole 
scene between Lewson and Stukely in the fourth act; but 
Davies's authority is not oracular. About the year 1751 Lord 
Lyttelton, in concert with Dodsley, projected the paper of ' The 
World,' of which it was agreed that Moore should enjoy the 
profits, whether the numbers were written by himself or by 
volunteer contributors. Lyttelton's interest soon enlisted many 
accomplished coadjutors, such as Cambridge, Jenyns, Lord Ches- 
terfield, and H. Walpole. Moore himself wrote sixty-one of the 
papers. In the last number of ' The World ' the conclusion is 
made to depend on a fictitious incident which had occasioned the 
death of the author. When the papers were collected into 
volumes, Moore, who superintended the publication, realised this 
jocular fiction by his own death, whilst the last number was in 

the press.* 

♦ 

JOHN DYER. 

[Bom, 1700. Died, 1758.] 
Dyer was the son of a solicitor at Aberglasney, in Caermarthen- 
shire. The witticism on his ' Fleece,' related by Dr. Johnson, 
that its author, if he was an old man, would be buried in woollen, 
has, perhaps, been oftener repeated than any passage in the poem 
itself. 



ALLAN RAMSAY. 

[Born, 1686. Died, 1757.] 
The personal history of Allan Ramsay is marked by few circum- 
stances of striking interest ; yet, independently of his poetry, he 
cannot be reckoned an insignificant individual who gave Scotland 

* [Mr- Moore was a poet who never had justice done him while living. 
There are few of the moderns who have a more correct taste or a more 
pleasing manner of expressing their thoughts. It was upon his ' Fables ' 
he chieiiy founded his reputation ; yet they are by no means his best pro- 
duction.— Goldsmith.] 



272 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

her first circulating library, and who established her first regular 
theatre. He was born in the parish of Crawfurd Moor, in 
Lanarkshire, where his father had the charge of Lord Hopeton*s 
lead-mines. His mother, Alice Bower, was the daughter of an 
Englishman who had emigrated to that place from Derbyshire. 
By his paternal descent the poet boasts of having sprung from 
*' a Douglas loin ;" but, owing to the early death of his father, 
his education was confined to a parish-school, and at the age of 
fifteen he was bound apprentice to the humble business of a wig- 
maker. On this subject one of his Scottish biographers refutes, 
with some indignation, a report which had gone abroad, that our 
poet was bred a barber ; and carefully instructs the reader, that 
in those good times, when a fashionable wig cost twenty guineas, 
the employment of manufacturing them was both lucrative and 
creditable.* Ramsay, however, seems to have felt no ambition 
either for the honours or profits of the vocation, as he left it on 
finishing his apprenticeship. In his twenty-fourth year he mar- 
ried the daughter of a writer, or attorney, in Edinburgh. His 
eldest sonf rose to well-known eminence as a painter. Our 

♦ Apropos to this delicate distinction of the Scottish biographer may be 
mentioued the advertisement of a French perruquier in the Palais Royale. 
who ranks his business among the " imitative arts." A London artist in the 
same profession had a similar jealousy with the historian of Ramsay's life 
at the idea of mere " trimmers of the human face "" being confounded with 
" genuine perruquiers.'' In advertising his crop-wigs he alluded to some 
wig-weaving competitors, whom he denominated " mere hairdressers and 
barbers ;" and " shall a barber," he exclaims, " affect to rival these crops ?"' 
" Barbarus has segetes." — Virgil. 

t This son of the poet was a man of literature as well as genius. The 
following whimsical specimen of his poetry is subjoined as a curiosity. The 
humorous substitution of the kirk-treasury man for Horace's wolf, in the 
third stanza, will only be recognised by those who understand the import- 
ance of that ecclesiastical officer in Scotland, and the powers with which he 
is invested for summoning delinquents before the clergy and elders in cases 
of illegitimate love : — 

Horace's " integer vit^," &c. 

By Allan Ramsay, Jun. 
" A man of no base (John) life or conversation, 
Needs not to trust in coat of mail nor buffskin. 
Nor need he vapour, with the sword and rapier. 

Pistol, or great gun. 

" Whether he ranges eastward to the Ganges, 
Or if he bends his course to the West Indies, 
Or sail the Sea Red, which so many strange odd 

Stories are told of. 



ALLAN RAMSAY. 273 



poet's first means of subsistence after his marriage were to publish 
small poetical productions in a cheap form, which became so 
popular that even in this hxmible sale he was obliged to call upon 
the magistrates to protect his literary property from the piracy 
of the hawkers. He afterwards set up as a bookseller, and pub- 
lished, at his own shop, a new edition of ' Christ's Kirk on the 
Green,* with two cantos of his own subjoined to the ancient 
original, which is ascribed to James I. of Scotland. A passage 
in one of those modern cantos of Ramsay's, describing a husband 
fascinated homewards from a scene of drunkenness by the gentle 
persuasions of his wife, has been tastefully selected by Wilkie, 
and been made the subject of his admirable pencil. 

In 1724 he published a collection of popular Scottish songs, 
called ' The Tea-Table Miscellany,' which speedily ran through 
twelve impressions. Ruddiman assisted him in the glossary, and 
Hamilton of Bangour, Crawfurd, and Mallet were among the 
contributors to his modern songs. In the same year appeared 
his ' Evergreen,' a collection of pieces from the Bannatyne MSS. 
written before the year 1600. Here the vanity of adorning what 
it was his duty to have faithfully transcribed led him to take 
many liberties with the originals ; and it is pretty clear that one 
poem, viz. * The Vision,' which he pretended to have found in 
ancient manuscript, was the fruit of his own brain. But ' The 
Vision,' considered as his own, adds a plume to his poetical cha- 
racter which may overshade his defects as an editor. 

In 1726 he published his ' Gentle Shepherd.' The first rudi- 

" For but last Monday, -walking at noon-day, 
Conning a ditty, to divert my Betty, 
r^ By me that son's Turk (I not frighted) our Kirk- 

". Treasurer's man pass'd : 

*' And sure more horrid monster in the torrid 
Zone ne'er was found, Sir, though for snakes renown'd, Sir, 
Nor can great Peter's empire boast such creatures, 

Th' of bears the wet-mirse, 

*' Should I by hap land on the coast of Lapland, 
Where there no fir is, much less pears and cherries, 
Where stormy weather 's sold by hags, whose leather 

faces would fright one — 

** Place me where tea grows, or where sooty negroes 
Sheep's guts round tie them, lest the sun should fry them — 
J Still while my Betty smiles and talks so pretty, 

I will adore her." 



274 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

merits of that pleasing drama had been given to the public in two 
pastoral dialogues, which were so much liked that his friends 
exhorted him to extend them into a regular play. The reception 
of this piece soon extended his reputation beyond Scotland. His 
works were reprinted at Dublin, and became popular in the colo- 
nies. Pope was known to admire ' The Gentle Shepherd ;' and 
Gay, when he was in Scotland, sought for explanations of its 
phrases, that he might communicate them to his friend at Twick- 
enham. Ramsay's shop was a great resort of the congenial 
fabulist while he remained in Edinburgh ; and from its windows, 
which overlooked the Exchange, the Scottish poet used to point 
out to Gay the most remarkable characters of the place. 

A second volume of his Poems appeared in 1728 ; and in 1730 
he published a collection of Fables, His Epistles in the former 
volume are generally indifferent ; but there is one addressed to 
the poet Somervile, which contains some easy lines. Professing 
to write from nature more than art, he compares, with some 
beauty, the rude style which he loved and practised to a neg- 
lected orchard : — 

" I love the garden wild and wide. 

Where oaks have plum-trees by their side, 

Where woodbines and the twisting vine 

Clip round the pear-tree and the pine ; 

Where mix'd jonquils and gowans * grow, 

And roses midst rank clover blow, 

Upon a bank of a clear strand, 

Its wimplings led by nature's hand ; 

Though docks and brambles, here and there, 

May sometimes cheat the gard'ner's care, 

Yet this to me"s a paradise. 

Compared to prime cut plots and nice, 

Where nature has to art resign'd, 

And all looks stiff, mean, and confined." 

Of original poets he says, in one expressive couplet, — 
" The native bards first plunged the deep. 
Before the artful dared to leap." 

About the age of forty- five he ceased to write for the public. 
The most remarkable circumstance of his life was an attempt 
which he made to establish a theatre in Edinburgh. Our poet had 
been always fond of the drama, and had occasionally supplied 
prologues to the players who visited the northern capital. But 
though the age of fanaticism was wearing away, it had not yet 
suffered the drama to have a settled place of exhibition in Scot- 
* Daisies. 



IJ 



ALLAN RAMSAY. 275 



land ; and when Eamsay had, with great expense, in the year 
1736, fitted up a theatre in Carubber's Close, the act for licens- 
ing the stage, which was passed in the following year, gave the 
magistrates of Edinburgh a power of shutting it up, which they 
exerted with gloomy severity. Such was the popular hatred of 
playhouses in Scotland at this period, that, some time afterwards, 
the mob of Glasgow demolished the first playhouse that was 
erected in their city ; and though the work of destruction was 
accomplished in daylight, by many hundreds, it was reckoned so 
godly that no reward could bribe any witness to appear or inform 
against the rioters. Ten years from the date of this disappoint- 
ment E-amsay had the satisfaction of seeing dramatic entertain- 
ments freely enjoyed by his fellow-citizens ; but in the mean time 
he was not only left without legal relief for his own loss in the 
speculation (having suffered what the Scotch law denominated a 
" damnum sine injuria"), but he was assailed with libels on his 
moral character, for having endeavoured to introduce the " helU 
hred playJwuse comedians ^ 

He spent some of the last years of his life in a house of whim- 
sical construction, on the north side of the Castle-hill of Edin- 
burgh, where the place of his residence is still distinguished by 
the name of Ramsay Garden. 

A scurvy in his gums put a period to his life in his seventy-* 

second year. He died at Edinburgh, and was interred in Grey 

Friars churchyard. Eamsay was small in stature, with dark but 

expressive and pleasant features. He seems to have possessed 

the constitutional philosophy of good humour. His genius gave 

him access to the society of those who were most distinguished 

for rank and talents in his native country ; but his intercourse 

with them was marked by no servility, and never seduced him 

from the quiet attention to trade by which he ultimately secured 

a moderate independence. His vanity in speaking of himself is 

, often excessive, but it is always gay and good-natured. On one 

t<©ccasion he modestly takes precedence of Peter the Great, 

hm estimating their comparative importance with the public. 

b^^ But ha'd,* proud Czar," he says, " I wad na nifFert fame." 

Much of his poetry breathes the subdued aspirations of Jacobit- 

; ism. He was one of those Scotsmen who for a long time would 

-jnQt extend their patriotism to the empire in which their country 

* Hold. t Exchange. 

t2 



276 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

was merged, and who hated the cause of the AYhigs in Scotland, 
from remembering its ancient connection with the leaven of fana- 
ticism. The Tory cause had also found its way to their enthu- 
siasm by being associated with the pathos and romance of the lost 
independence of their country. The business ofDarien was still 
" alta mente repostum." Fletcher's eloquence on the subject of 
the Union was not forgotten, nor that of Belhaven, who had 
apostrophized the genius of Caledonia in the last meeting of her 
senate, and who died of grief at the supposed degradation of hi^ 
eount^5^ Visionary as the idea of Scotland's independence as a 
kingdom might be, we must most of all excuse it in a poet whose 
fancy was expressed, and whose reputation was bound up, in a 
dialect from which the Union took away the last chance of 
perpetuity. 

Our poet's miscellaneous pieces, though some of them are very 
ingenious,* are upon the whole of a much coarser grain than his 
pastoral drama. The admirers of ' The Gentle Shepherd ' must 
perhaps be contented to share some suspicion of national parti-' 
ality, while they do justice to their own feeling of its merit. Yet, 
as this drama is a picture of rustic Scotland, it would perhaps be 
saying little for its fidelity, if it yielded no more agreeableness to 
the breast of a native than he could expound to a stranger by 
the strict letter of criticism. We should think the painter had 
finished the likeness of a mother very indifferently, if it did not ^ 
bring home to her children traits of indefinable expression which 
had escaped every eye but that of familiar affection. Ramsay had 
not the force of Burns ; but neither, in just proportion to his 
merits, is he likely to be felt by an English reader. The fire of 
Burns' wit and passion glows through an obscure dialect by its 
confinement to short and concentrated bursts. The interest 
which Ramsay excites is spread over a long poem, delineating 
manners more than passions ; and the mind must be at home both 
in the language and manners to appreciate the skill and comic ■ 
archness with which he has heightened the display of rustic cha- 
racter without giving it vulgarity, and refined the view of peasant^ 
life by situations of sweetness and tenderness without departing^ 5 
in the least degree from its simplicity. * The Gentle Shepherd * 

* Particularly the tale of ' The Monk and the Miller's Wife.' This story 
is unhappily unfit for a popular collection, but it is well told. It is bor- 
rowed from an old poem attributed to Dunbar. 



SHENSTONE. 277 



stands quite apart from the general pastoral poetry of modern 
Europe. It has no satyrs, nor featureless simpletons, nor drowsy 
and still landscapes of nature, but distinct characters and amusing 
incidents. The principal shepherd never speaks out of consist- 
ency with the habits of a peasant ; but he moves in that sphere 
with such a manly spirit, with so much cheerful sensibility to its 
humble joys, with maxims of life so rational and independent, and 
with an ascendancy over his fellow-swains so well maintained by 
bis force of character, that, if we could suppose the pacific scenes 
of the drama to be suddenly changed into situations of trouble 
and danger, we should, in exact consistency with our former 
idea of him, expect him to become the leader of the peasants, 
and the Tell of his native hamlet. Nor is the character of 
his mistress less beautifully conceived. She is represented, like 
himself, as elevated, by a fortunate discovery, from obscure to 
opulent life, yet as equally capable of being the ornament of 
either. A Richardson or a D'Arblay, had they continued her 
history, might have heightened the portrait, but they would not 
have altered its outline. Like the poetry of Tasso and Ariosto, 
that of ' The Gentle Shepherd ' is engraven on the memory of its 
native country. Its verses have passed into proverbs; and it 
continues to be the delight and solace of the peasantry whom it 
describes. 



WILLIAM SHENSTONK 

[Born, 1714. Died, 1763. J 

The Frenchman wlio dedicated a stone in his garden to the 
memory of Shenstone* was not wholly wrong in ascribing to 
him a *' taste natural," for there is a freshness and distinctness 
in his rural images, like those of a man who had enjoyed the 

* M. Girardin, at his estate of Ermenonville, formed a garden in some 
degree on the English model, with inscriptions after the manner of 
Shenstone, one of which, dedicated to Shenstone himself, ran thus : — 

" This plain stone 
To William Shenstone. 
In his writings he display "d 
A mind natural ; 
At Leasowes he laid 
Arcadian greens rural." 



27S LIVES OF THE POETS. 

country with his own senses, and very unlike the descriptions 

of 

" A pastoral poet from Leadenhall-street,*' 

who may have never heard a lamb bleat but on its way to the 
slaughterhouse. At the same time there is a certain air of 
masquerade in his pastoral character as applied to the man him- 
self ; and he is most natural in those pieces where he is least 
Arcadian. It may seem invidious, perhaps, to object to Shen- 
stone making his appearance in poetry with his pipe and his 
crook, while custom has so much inured us to the idea of Spenser 
feigning himself to be Colin Clout, and to his styling Sir Walter 
Raleigh the " Shepherd of the Ocean " — an expression, by the 
way, which is not remarkably intelligible, and which, perhaps, 
might not unfairly be placed under Miss Edgeworth's description 
of English bulls. Gabriel Harvey used also to designate him- 
self Hobbinol in his poetry ; and Browne, Lodge, Drayton, 
Milton, and many others, describe themselves as surrounded 
by their flocks, though none of them probably ever possessed a live 
sheep in the course of their lives. But with respect to the poets 
of Elizabeth^s reign, their distance from us appears to soften the 
romantic licence of the fiction, and we regard them as beings in 
some degree characterised by their vicinity to the ages of romance. 
Milton, though coming later, invests his pastoral disguise (in 
* Lycidas ') with such enchanting picturesqueness as wholly to 
divert our attention from the unreal shepherd to the real poet. 
But from the end of the seventeenth century pastoral poetry 
became gradually more and more unprofitable in South Britain, 
and tlie figure of the genuine shepherd swain began to be chiefly 
confined to pictures on china, and to opera ballets. Shenstoue 
was one of the last of our respectable poets who aflTected this 
Arcadianism, but he was too modern to sustain it in perfect 
keeping. His entire poetry, therefore, presents us with a double 
image of his character : one impression which it leaves is that of 
an agreeable, indolent gentleman, of cultivated taste and refined 
sentiments ; the other that of Corydon, a purely amatory and 
ideal swain. It would have been so far well, if those characters 
had been kept distinct, like two impressions on the opposite sides 
of a medal. But he has another pastoral name, that of Damon, 
in which the swain and the gentleman are rather incongruously 
blended together. Damon has also his festive garlands and 



CAREY. 279 



dfinces at wakes and may-poles, but he is moreover a disciple of 
virtu : 

*' his hosom burns 
With statues, paintings, coins, and urns." 

*' He sighs to call one Titian stroke his own ;" expends his 
fortune on building domes and obelisks, is occasionally delighted 
to share his vintage with an old college acquaintance, and dreams 
of inviting Delia to a mansion with Venetian windows. 

Apart from those ambiguities, Shenstone is a pleasing writer, 
both in his lighter and graver vein. His genius is not forcible, 
but it settles in mediocrity without meanness. His pieces of 
levity correspond not disagreeably with their title. His ' Ode to 
Memory ' is worthy of protection from the power which it in- 
vokes. Some of the stanzas of his ^ Ode to Rural Elegance ' 
seem to recall to us the country-loving spirit of Cowley, subdued 
in wit, but harmonised in expression. From the commencement 
of the stanza in that ode, " O sweet disposer of the rural hour," 
he sustains an agreeable and peculiarly refined strain of poetical 
feeling. The ballad of * Jemmy Dawson,' and the elegy on 
* Jessy,' are written with genuine feeling. With all the beauties 
of the Leasowes in our minds, it may be still regretted that, 
instead of devoting his whole soul to clumping beeches, and pro- 
jecting mottos for summer-houses, he had not gone more into 
living nature for subjects, and described her interesting realities 
with the same fond and naive touches which give so much de- 
lightfulness to his portrait of the ' Schoolmistress.'* 



HENRY CAREY. 

[Died, Oct. 4, 1743.] 

Henhy Carey was a musician by profession, and author both of 
the words and melody of the pleasing song of ' Sally in our 
Alley.' He came to an untimely death by his own hands. 

bfji * ['^^^^ poem is one of those happinesses in which a poet excels himself, 
SB there is nothing in all Shenstone which any way approaches it in merit ; 

"and though I dislike the imitations of our English poets in general, yet, on 
this minute subject, the antiquity of the style produces a very ludicrous 
absurdity.— Goldsmith. 

'''"'The Schoolmistress' is excellent of its kind and masterly. — Gray to 

r'Walpole. 

" When I bought Spenser first," says Shenstone, " I read a page or two of 



280 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



CHARLES CHURCHILL. 

[Born, 1731. Died, 1764.] 
He was the son of a respectable clergyman, who was curate and 
lecturer of St. John's, Westminster. He was educated at West- 
minster School, and entered of Trinity College, Cambridge ; but 
not being disposed 

" O'er crabbed authors life's gay prime to M-aste, 
Or cramp -wild genius in the chains of taste," 
he left the university abruptly, and, coming to London, made a 
clandestine marriage in the Fleet.* His father, though much 
displeased at the proceeding, became reconciled to what could 
not be remedied, and received the imprudent couple for about a 
year under his roof. After this young Churchill went for some 
time to study theology at Sunderland, in the north of England, 
and, having taken orders, officiated at Cadbury, in Somersetshire, 
and at Rainham, a living of his father's, in Essex, till, upon the 
death of his father, he succeeded in 1758 to the curacy and lecture- 
ship of St. John's, Westminster. Here he conducted himself for 
some time with a decorum suitable to his profession, and increased 
his narrow income by undertaking private tuition. He got into 
debt, it is true ; and Dr. Lloyd, of Westminster, the father of 
his friend the poet, was obliged to mediate with his creditors for 
their acceptance of a composition ; but when fortune put it into 
his power Churchill honourably discharged all his obligations. 
His * Rosciad ' appeared, at first anonymously, in 1761, and was 
ascribed to one or other of half the wits in town ; but his 
acknowledgment of it, and his poetical ^ Apology,' in which he 
retaliated upon the critical reviewers of his poem (not fearing 
to affront even Fielding and Smollett), made him at once famous 
and formidable. The players at least felt him to be so. Garrick 
himself, who, though extolled in ' The Rosciad,' was sarcastically 
alluded to in ' The Apology,' courted him like a suppliant ; and 

' The Faerie Queene,' and cared not to proceed. After that Pope's ' Alley ' 
made me consider him ludicrously ; and in that light I think one may read 
him with pleasure." We owe * The Schoolmistress ' to this complete miscon- 
ception of Spenser's genius and manner. 

Mr. Disraeli has an entertaining paper on Shenstone, but has omitted to 
mention that the first sketch of ' The Schoolmistress,' in twelve stanzas, is 
in Sbenstone's first publication.] 

* [Mr. Southey believes that his marriage took place previous to his 
entering the University of Cambridge. — Life of Cowper, vol. i. p. 70.] 



CHURCHILL. 281 



his satire had the effect of driving poor Tom Davies, the biogra- 
pher of Garrick, though he was a tolerable performer, from the 
stage.* A letter from another actor, of the name of Davis, 
who seems rather to have dreaded than experienced his severity, 
is preserved in Nichols's ' Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth 
Century,' in which the poor comedian deprecates the poet's 
censure in an expected publication, as likely to deprive him of 
bread. What was mean in Garrick might have been an object 
of compassion in this humble man ; but Churchill answered him 
with surly contempt, and, holding to the plea of justice, treated 
his fears with the apparent satisfaction of a hangman. His 
moral character, in the mean time, did not keep pace with his 
literary reputation. As he got above neglect, he seems to have 
thought himself above censure. His superior, the Dean of 
Westminster, having had occasion to rebuke him for some irre- 
gularities, he threw aside at once the clerical habit and profession, 
and arrayed his ungainly form in the splendour of fashion. 
Amidst the remarks of his enemies, and what he pronounces the 
still more insulting advice of his prudent friends upon his irregular 
life, he published his epistle to Lloyd, entitled ' Night,' a sort of 
manifesto of the impulses, for they could not be called principles, 
by which he professed his conduct to be influenced. The leading 
maxims of this epistle are, that prudence and hypocrisy in these 
times are the same thing ! that good hours are but fine words ; 
and that it is better to avow faults than to conceal them. Speak- 
ing of his convivial enjoyments he says 

r " Night's laughing hours unheeded slip away, 

Nor one dull thought foretells approach of day." 

In the same description he somewhat awkwardly introduces 
" Wine's gay god, with Temperance by his side, 
whilst Health attends." 

How would Churchill have belaboured any fool or hypocrite 
who had pretended to boast of health and temperance in the 
midst of orgies that turned night into day ! 

By his connexion with Wilkes he added political to personal 

* Nichols, in his ' Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century,' vol. vi. 
p. 424, gives this information of Tom Davies' s being driven off the stage by 
; Churchill's satire, on the authority of Dr. Johnson. This Davies was the 
I editor of ' Dramatic Miscellanies,' and of ' The Life and Works of Lillo.* 
j The name of the other poor player who implored Churchill's mercy was T. 
j Davis, his name being differently spelt from that of Garrick's biographer. 
I Churchill's answer to him is also preserved by Nichols. 



282 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

causes of animosity, and did not diminish the number of unfavour- 
able eyes that were turned upon his private character. He had 
certainly, with all his faults, some strong and good qualities of 
the heart ; but the particular proofs of these were not likely to 
be sedulously collected as materials of his biography, for he had 
now placed himself in that light of reputation when a man's 
likeness is taken by its shadow and darkness. Accordingly, the 
most prominent circumstances that we afterwards learn respect- 
ing him are, that he separated from his wife, and seduced the 
daughter of a tradesman in Westminster. At the end of a fort- 
night, either from his satiety or repentance, he advised this 
unfortunate woman to return to her friends ; but took her back 
again upon her finding her home made intolerable by the re- 
proaches of a sister.* His reputation for inebriety also received 
some public acknowledgments. Hogarth gave as much celebrity 
as he could to his love of porter, by representing him in the act 
of drinking a mug of that liquor in the shape of a bear ;'\ but 
the painter had no great reason to congratulate himself ultimately 
on the effects of his caricature. Our poet was included in the 
general warrant that was issued for apprehending Wilkes. He 
hid himself, however, and avoided imprisonment. In the autumn 
of 1764 he paid a visit to Mr. Wilkes at Boulogne, where he 
caught a miliary fever, and expired in his thirty-third year.J 

* [The only laudable part of Churchill's conduct during his short career 
of popularity was, that he carefully laid by a provision for those who were 
dependent on him. This was his meritorious motive for that greediness of 
gain with which he was reproached : as if it were any reproach to a success- 
ful author, that he doled out his writings in the way most advantageous for 
himself, and fixed upon them as high a price as his admirers were willing 
to pay ! He thus enabled himself to bequeath an annuity of sixty pounds 
to his widow, and of fifty to the more unhappy woman who, after they had 
both repented of their guilty intercourse, had fled to him again for the pro- 
tection which she knew not where else to seek. And when these duties 
had been provided for, there remained some surplus for his two sons. Well 
would it be if he might be as fairly vindicated on other points. — Southey, 
Cowper, vol. ii. p. 160.] 

I [Mr. Campbell has missed the point of the picture. Churchill is repre- 
sented as a bear in clerical bands that are torn, and rufBed paws.] 

I His body was brought from Boulogne to Dover, and interred in the 
church of St. Martin, where his grave is distinguished by what Mr. Southey 
calls au epicurean line from one of his own poems : — 

" Life to the last enjoy'd, here Churchill lies." 
See also Byron's poem entitled ' Churchill's Grave : ' — 

" I stood before the grave of him who blazed 
The comet of a season" — 
(Works, vol. X. p. 287,) and Scott's note.] 



CHURCHILL. 283 



Churchill may be ranked as a satirist immediately after Pope 
and Dryden, with perhaps a greater share of humour than either. 
He has the bitterness of Pope, with less wit to atone for it ; but 
no mean share of the free manner and energetic plainness of 
Dryden. After ' The Rosciad ' and ^ The Apology ' he began his 
poem of ' The Ghost ' (founded on the well-known story of Cock- 
lane), many parts of which tradition reports him to have com- 
posed when scarce recovered from his fits of drunkenness. It is 
certainly a rambling and scandalous production, with a few such 
original gleams as might have crossed the brain of genius amidst 
the bile and lassitude of dissipation. The novelty of political 
warfare seems to have given a new impulse to his powers in ' The 
Prophecy of Famine,' a satire on Scotland, which even to 
Scotchmen must seem to sheath its sting in its laughable extra- 
vagance. His poetical Epistle to Hogarth is remarkable, amidst 
its savage ferocity, for one of the best panegyrics that was ever 
bestowed on that painter's works. He scalps indeed even bar- 
barously the infirmities of the man, but, on the whole, spares the 
laurels of the artist. The following is his description of Hogarth's 
powers : — 

" In walks of humour, in that cast of style, 
Which, probing to the quick, yet makes us smile ; 
In comedy, his nat'ral road to fame, 
Nor let me call it by a meaner name, 
Where a beginning, middle, and an end 
Are aptly join'd ; where parts on parts depend, 
Each made for each, as bodies for their soul, 
So as to form one true and perfect whole ; 
Where a plain story to the eye is told, 
Which we conceive the moment we behold, 
Hogarth unrivall'd stands, and shall engage 
Unrivall'd praise to the most distant age." 

There are two peculiarly interesting passages in his ' Conference.' 

One of them, expressive of remorse for his crime of seduction, 

has been often quoted. The other is a touching description of 

'JR] man of independent spirit reduced by despair and poverty 

^jjto, accept of the means of sustaining life on humiliating 

'sterms : — 

" What proof might do, what hunger might effect, 
What famish'd nature, looking with neglect 
On all she once held dear, what fear, at strife 
With fainting virtue for the means of life. 
Might make this coward flesh, in love with breath, 
Shudd'ring at pain, and shrinking back from death, 



284 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

In treason to my soul, descend to bear, 
Trusting to fate, I neither know nor care. 

Once — at this hour those wounds afresh I feel, 
"Which nor prosperity nor time can heal, 
* « * ■ * * 

Those wounds, which humbled all that pride of man, 
Which brings such mighty aid to virtue's plan ; — 
Once, awed by fortune's most oppressive frown, 
By legal rapine to the earth bow'd down, 
My credit at last gasp, my state undone, 
Trembling to meet the shock I could not shun, 
Virtue gave ground, and black despair prevail'd ; 
Sinking beneath the storm, my spirits faild. 
Like Peter's faith." 

But without enumerating similar passages, which may form an 

exception to the remark, the general tenor of his later works fell 

beneath his first reputation. His * Duellist ' is positively dull ; 

and his ' Gotham,' the imaginary realm of which he feigns himself 

the sovereign, is calculated to remind us of the proverbial wisdom 

of its sages.* It was justly complained that he became too 

much an echo of himself, and that, before his short literary 

career was closed, his originality appeared to be exhausted. 



ROBERT LLOYD. 

[Bom, 1733. Died, 1764.] 

Robert Lloyd was the son of one of the masters of West- 
minster School. He studied at Cambridge, and was for some time 
usher at Westminster, but forsook that employment for the life 
of an author and the habits of a man of pleasure. His first 
publication that attracted any notice was * The Actor,* the 
reputation of which stimulated Churchill to his * Rosciad.' He 
contributed to several periodical works ; but was unable by his 
literary efforts to support the dissipated life which he led with 
Colman, Thornton, and other gay associates. His debts brought 
him to the Fleet ; and those companions left him to moralise on 
the instability of convivial friendships. Churchill, however, 
adhered to him, and gave him pecuniary relief to prevent him 
from starving in prison. During his confinement he published a 

* [Cowper was of another opinion. " * Gotham,' " he says, " is a noble 
and beautiful poem : making allowance (and Dryden perhaps, in his ' Ab- 
salom and Achitophel,' stands in need of the same indulgence) for au 
unwarrantable use of Scripture, it appears to me to be a masterly perform-i-; 
ance." — Southey's Cowper, vol. i. p. 91.] 



LLOYD— MALLET. 



volume of his poems ; wrote a comic opera, * The Capricious 
Lovers ;' and took a share in translating the ^ Contes Moraux ' 
of Marmontel. When the death of Churchill was announced to 
him, he exclaimed, " I shall follow poor Charles !" fell into 
despondency, and died within a few weeks. Churchill's sister, 
to whom he was betrothed, died of a broken heart for his loss.* 



DAVID MALLET. 

[Born about 1700. Died, 1765.] 

Op Mallet's birthplace and family nothing is certainly known ; 
but Dr. Johnson's account of his descent from the sanguinary 
clan of MacGregor is probably not much better founded than 
what he tells us of his being janitor to the High School of Edin- 
burgh. That officer has, from time immemorial, lived in a 
small house at the gate of the school, of which he sweeps the 
floors and rings the bell.j Mallet, at the alleged time of his 
being thus employed, was private tutor in the family of Mr. 
Home, of Dreghorn, near Edinburgh. By a Mr. Scott he was 
recommended to be tutor to the sons of the Duke of Montrose, 
and after travelling on the Continent with his pupils, and return- 
ing to London, made his way, according to Dr. Johnson, into 
the society of wits, nobles, and statesmen, by the influence of 
the family in which he had lived. Perhaps the mere situation 
of a nobleman's tutor would not have gained such access to a 
diflfident man ; but Mallet's manners and talents were peculiarly 
fitted to make their way in the world. His ballad of ' William 
and Margaret,' in 1724, first brought him into notice. He 
became intimate with Pope, and had so much celebrity in 
his day as to be praised in rhyme both by Savage and Lord 
Chesterfield. In time [June 1742] he was appointed under- 
secretary to the Prince of Wales. Some of his letters in the 
earlier part of his life express an interest and a friendship for the 
poet Thomson which do honour to his heart ; but it cannot be 
diisguised that his general history exhibits more address than 

^ * [Lloyd's best productions are his two Odes, to * Obscurity' and * Ob- 
livion,' written in ridicule of Gray ; and in which the elder Colman had an 
uncertain share.] 

t [And is an office always intrusted, we believe, to men technically called 
up in years.] 



286 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

principle, and his literary career is unimportant. Some years 
before his death he was appointed keeper of the book of entries 
for the port of London, and enjoyed a pension for an address to 
the public which contributed to hasten the execution of Byng — 
a fact for which, if true, his supposed ancestors, the MacGregors, 
might have been ashamed to acknowledge him. »i 



EDWARD YOUNG. 

[Born, 1681. Died, 1765.] 

Young's satires have at least the merit of containing a number 
of epigrams, and, as they appeared rather earlier than those of 
Pope, they may boast of having afforded that writer some degree 
of example. Swift's opinion of them, however, seems not to 
have been unjust — that they should have either been more merry 
or more angry. One of his tragedies is still popular on the 
stage ; and his * Night Thoughts ' have many admirers both at 
home and abroad. Of his lyrical poetry he had himself the good 
sense to think but indifferently. In none of his works is he 
more spirited and amusing than in his ' Essay on Original Com- 
position,' written at the age of eighty. 

The ' Night Thoughts ' have been translated into more than ' 
one foreign language ; and it is usual for foreigners to regard 
them as eminently characteristic of the peculiar temperament of i 
English genius. Madame de Stael has, indeed, gravely deduced i 
the genealogy of our national melancholy from Ossian and ther 
Northern Scalds down to Dr. Young. Few Englishmen, how-- 
ever, will probably be disposed to recognise the author of thet 
'Night Thoughts' as their national poet by way of eminence.' 
His devotional gloom is more in the spirit of St. Francis of 
Asisium than of an English divine ; and his austerity is blendedj 
with a vein of whimsical conceit that is still more unlike the 
plainness of English character. The ' Night Thoughts ' cer- 
tainly contain many splendid and happy conceptions, but their 
beauty is thickly marred by false wit and overlaboured anti- 
thesis : indeed his whole ideas seem to have been in a state of 
antithesis while he composed the poem. One portion of his 
fancy appears devoted to aggravate the picture of his desolate 
feelings, and the other half to^contradict that picture by eccentric 



YOUNG. 287 



images and epigrammatic ingenuities. As a poet he was fond 
of exaggeration, but it was that of the fancy more than of the 
heart. This appears no less in the noisy hyperboles of his tra- 
gedies, than in the studied melancholy of the ' Night Thoughts,' 
in which he pronounces the simple act of laughter to be half 
immortal. That he was a pious man, and had felt something 
from the afflictions described in ' The Complaint/ need not be 
called in question,* but he seems covenanting with himself to be 
as desolate as possible, as if he had continued the custom ascribed 
to him at college, of studying with a candle stuck in a human 
skull ; while, at the same time, the feelings and habits of a man 
of the world, which still adhere to him, throw a singular contrast 
over his renunciations of human vanity. He abjures the world 
in witty metaphors, commences his poem with a sarcasm on 
sleep, deplores his being neglected at court, compliments a lady 
of quality by asking the moon if she would choose to be called 
the ^' fair Portland of the skies i^ and dedicates to the patrons 
of " a much indebted Muse^^ one of whom (Lord Wilmington^) 
on some occasion he puts in the balance of antithesis as a counter- 
part to heaven. He was, in truth, not so sick of life as of 
missing its preferments, and was still ambitious not only of con- 
verting Lorenzo, but of shining before this utterly worthless and 
wretched world as a sparkling, sublime, and witty poet. Hence 
his poetry has not the majestic simplicity of a heart abstracted 
from human vanities ; and while the groundwork of his senti- 
ments is more darkly shaded than is absolutely necessary either 
for poetry or religion, the surface of his expression glitters with 
irony and satire, and with thoughts sometimes absolutely ap- 
proaching to pleasantry. His ingenuity in the false sublime is 
-Very peculiar. In Night IX. he concludes his description of 
<the day of judgment by showing the just and the unjust consigned 
a^fespectively to their " sulphureous or ambrosial seats" while 

"i* *' Hell through all her glooms 

Returns in groans a melancholy roar." 

This is aptly put under the book of Consolation. But instead of 

jy^ding up his labours, he proceeds through a multitude of re- 

^ * It appears, however, from Sir "Herbert Croft's account of his life, [in 
'Jbhnson's ' Poets,'] that he had not lost the objects of his affection in such 
rapid succession as he feigns, when he addresses the "insatiate archer 
(Death) whose shaft flew thrice ere thrice yon moon had filled her horn." 
t [The Lord Wilmington of Thomson's ' Winter.'] 



288 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

flections, and amidst many comparisons assimilates the constel- 
lations of heaven to gems of immense weight and value on a ring 
for the finger of their Creator. Conceit could hardly go farther 
than to ascribe finery to Omnipotence. The taste of the French 
artist was not quite so bold, when, in the picture of Belshazzar's 
Feast, he put a ring and ruffle on the hand that was writing on 
the wall. 

Here, however, he was in earnest comparatively with some 
other passages, such as that in which he likens Death to Nero 
driving a phaeton in a female guise, or where he describes the 
same personage, Death, borrowing the " cockaded brow of a 
spendthrift,^* in order to gain admittance to " a gay circle." 
Men, with the same familiarity, are compared to monkeys before 
a looking-glass ; and, at the end of the eighth book, Satan is 
roundly denominated a " dunce :"* the first time, perhaps, that 
his abilities were ever seriously called in question. f 

Shall we agree with Dr. Johnson when he afliirms of the 
' Night Thoughts ' that particular lines are not to be regarded, 
that the power is in the whole, and that in the whole there is a 
magnificence like that which is ascribed to a Chinese plantation, 
the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity ? Of a 
Chinese plantation few men have probably a very distinct con- 
ception ; but unless that species of landscape be an utterly 
capricious show of objects, in which case even extent and variety 
will hardly constitute magnificence, it must possess amusement 
and vicissitude, arising from the relation of parts to each other. 
But there is nothing of entertaining succession of parts in the 
* Night Thoughts.' The poem excites no anticipation as it 
proceeds. One book bespeaks no impatience for another, nor is 
found to have laid the smallest foundation for new pleasure 
when the succeeding night sets in. The poet's fancy discharges 
itself on the mind in short ictuses of surprise, which rather lose 
than increase their force by reiteration ; but he is remarkably 
defective in progressive interest and collective effect. The 
power of the poem, instead of " being in the whole,*' lies in 

* " Nor think this sentence is severe on thee, — 
Satan, thy master, I dare call a dunce.*' 

Concluding lines of Night VIII. 
t [The * Night Thoughts ' are spoken of differently, either with exagge- 
rated applause or contempt, as the reader's disposition is either turned to 
mirth or melancholy. — Goldsmith.] 



YOUNG. 



short, vivid, and broken gleams of genius ; so that, if we dis- 
regard particular lines, we shall but too often miss the only- 
gems of ransom which the poet can bring as the price of his 
relief from surrounding taedium. Of any long work, where the 
power really lies in the whole, we feel reluctant to hazard the 
character by a few short quotations, because a few fragments can 
convey no adequate idea of the architecture ; but the directly 
reverse of this is the case with the ' Night Thoughts,' for by- 
selecting particular beauties of the poem we should delight and 
electrify a sensitive reader, but might put him to sleep by a 
perusal of the whole. This character of detached felicities, un- 
connected with interesting progress or reciprocal animation of 
parts, may be likened to a wilderness, without path or per- 
spective, or to a Chinese plantation (if the illustration be more 
agreeable) ; but it does not correspond with our idea of the 
magnificence of a great poem, of which it can be said that the 
power is in the whole. After all, the variety and extent of 
reflection in the ' Night Thoughts ' is to a certain degree more 
imposing than real. They have more metaphorical than sub- 
stantial variety of thought. Questions which we had thought 
exhausted and laid at rest in one book, are called up again in 
the next in a Proteus metamorphosis of shape, and a chameleon 
diversity of colour. Happily the awful truths which they illus- 
trate are few and simple. Around those truths the poet directs 
his course with innumerable sinuosities of fancy, like a man 
appearing to make a long voyage while he is in reality only 
crossing and recrossing the same expanse of water. 

He has been well described in a late poem, as one in whom 

" Still gleams and still expires the cloudy day 
Of genuine poetry." 

The above remarks have been made with no desire to depre- 
ciate what is genuine in his beauties. The reader most sensitive 
to his faults must have felt that there is in him a spark of 
originality which is never long extinguished, however far it may 
be from vivifying the entire mass of his poetry. Many and 
exquisite are his touches of sublime expression, of profound re- 
flection, and of striking imagery. It is recalling but a few of 
these to allude to his description, in the eighth book, of the man 
whose thoughts are not of this world, to his simile of the traveller 
at the opening of the ninth book, to his spectre of the antediluvian 

u 



290 LIVES OF THE POETS, 

world, and to some parts of his very unequal description of the \ 

conflagration ; above all, to that noble and familiar image, 

" When final Euin fiercely drives 

Her ploughshare o'er creation.''* j 

It is true that he seldom, if ever, maintains a flight of poetry 3 

long free from oblique associations ; but he has individual pas- | 

sages which Philosophy might make her texts and Experience i 

select for her mottoes. 7 



JOHN BROWN. 

[Born, 1715. Died, 1765.] 

His poetry never obtained, or indeed deserved, much attention ; 
but his * Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times ' 
passed through seven editions, and threw the nation into a tem- 
porary ferment. Voltaire alleges that it roused the English 
from lethargy by the imputation of degeneracy, and made them 
put forth a vigour that proved victorious in the war with France. 



MICHAEL BRUCE. 

[Born, 1746. Died, 1767.] 

IVIiCHAEL Bruce was born in the parish of Kinneswood, in 
Kinross-shire, Scotland. His father was by trade a weaver, who 
out of his scanty earnings had the merit of affording his son an 
education at the grammar-school of Kinross, and at the Uni- 
versity of Edinburgh. Michael was delicate from his childhood, 
but showed an early disposition for study, and a turn for poetry, 
which was encouraged by some of his neighbours lending him a ' 
few of the most popular English poets. The humblest indi-' 
viduals who have befriended genius deserve to be gratefully 
mentioned. The first encouragers to whom Bruce showed his 
poetical productions were a Mr. Arnot, a farmer on the banks of 
Lochleven, and one David Pearson, whose occupation is not 
described. In his sixteenth year he went to the University of 

* [A passage imitated by Burns in his poem ' To the Daisy :' — 
*' Stern Ruin's ploughshare drires elate 
Full on thy bloom, 
Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight 
Shall be thy doom." 



J. BROWN-BRUCE-GRAINGER. 291 

Edinburgh, where, after the usual course of attendance, he 
entered on the study of divinity, intending, probably, to be a 
preacher in the Burgher sect of dissenters, to whom his parents 
belonged. Between the latter sessions which he attended at 
college, he taught a small school at Gairney Bridge, in the 
neighbourhood of his native place, and afterwards at Forest- 
hill, near Allan, in Clackmannanshire. This is nearly the 
whole of his sad and short history. At the latter place he was 
seized with a deep consumption, the progress of which in his 
constitution had always inclined him to melancholy. Under the 
toils of a day and evening school, and without the comforts that 
might have mitigated disease, he mentions his situation to a 
friend in a touching but resigned manner — " I had expected," 
he says, "to be happy here ; but my sanguine hopes are the 
reason of my disappointment." He had cherished sanguine 
hopes of happiness, poor youth ! in his little village-school ; but 
he seems to have been ill encouraged by his employers, and 
complains that he had no company, but what was worse than 
solitude. " I believe," he adds, " if I had not a lively imagina- 
tion I should fall into a state of stupidity or delirium." He 
was now composing his poem on Lochleven, in which he 
describes himself, 

" Amid unfertile wilds, recording thus 
The dear remembrance of his native fields, 
To cheer the tedious night ; while slow disease 
Prey'd on his pining vitals, and the blasts 
Of dark December shook his humble cot." 

During the winter he quitted his school, and, returning to his 

father's house, lingered on for a few months till he expired, in 

his twenty-first year. During the spring he wrote an elegy on 

the prospect of his own dissolution, a most interesting relic of 

his amiable feelings and fortitude. 



JAMES GRAINGER. 

[Born, 1721. Died, 1766.] 

Dr. James G-rainger, the translator of Tibullus, was for 
some time a surgeon in the army ; he afterwards attempted, 
without success, to obtain practice as a physician in London, and 
finally settled in St. Kitt's, where he married the governor's 

u2 



292 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

daughter. The novelty of West Indian scenery inspired him - 
with the unpromising subject of the Sugar-cane, in which he i 
very poetically dignifies the poor negroes with the name of ' 



WILLIAM FALCONER. 

[Born, 1730. Died, 1769.] 

William Falconer was the son of a barber in Edinburgh, and 
went to sea at an early age in a merchant- vessel of Leith. He 
was afterwards mate of a ship that was wrecked in the Levant, 
and was one of only three out of her crew that were saved, a ] 
catastrophe which formed the subject of his future poem. He 
was for some time in the capacity of a servant to Campbell, the 
author of ' Lexiphanes,' when purser of a ship. Campbell is said 
to have discovered in Falconer talents worthy of cultivation, and, 
when the latter distinguished himself as a poet, used to boast 
that he had been his scholar. What he learned from Campbell 
it is not very easy to ascertain. His education, as he often 
assured Governor Hunter, had been confined to reading, writing, 
and a little arithmetic, though in the course of his life he picked 
up some acquaintance with the French, Spanish, and Italian' 
languages. In these his countryman was not likely to have' 
much assisted him ; but he might have lent him books, and pos- 
sibly instructed him in the use of figures. Falconer published 
his ' Shipwreck' in 1762, and by the favour of the Duke of York, 
to whom it was dedicated, obtained the appointment of a mid- 
shipman in the Royal George, and afterwards that of purser in 
the Glory frigate. He soon afterwards married a Miss Hicks, 
an accomplished and beautiful woman, the daughter of the sur-' 
geon of Sheerness-yard. At the peace of 1763 he was on the 
point of being reduced to distressed circumstances by his ship^ 
being laid up in ordinary at Chatham, when, by the friendship 
of Commissioner Hanway, who ordered the cabin of the Glory' 
to be fitted up for his residence, he enjoyed for some time a 
retreat for study without expense or embarrassment. Here he 

* [If Grainger has inroked the Muse to sing of rats, and metamorphose^: 
m Arcadian phrase negro-slaves into swains, the fault is in the writer, not 
in the topic. The arguments which he has prefixed are, indeed, ludicrously 
flat and formal. — Southey, Quar. Rev., vol. xi. p. 489.] 



FALCONER, 293 



employed himself in compiling- his * Marine Dictionary/ which 
appeared in 1769, and has been always highly spoken of by those 
who are capable of estimating its merits. He embarked also in 
the politics of the day, as a poetical antagonist to Churchill, but 
with little advantage to his memory. Before the publication of 
his '/ Marine Dictionary ' he had left his retreat at Chatham for 
a less comfortable abode in the metropolis, and appears to have 
struggled with considerable difficulties, in the midst of which he 
received proposals from the late Mr. Murray, the bookseller,* 
to join him in the business which he had newly established. The 
cause of his refusing' this offer was, in all probability, the ap- 
pointment which he received to the pursership of the Aurora 
East Indiaman. In that ship he embarked for India in Sep- 
tember 1769, but the Aurora was never heard of after she 
passed the Cape, and was thought to have foundered in the 
Channel of Mozambique ; so that the poet of * The Shipwreck * 
may be supposed to have perished by the same species of calamity 
which he had rehearsed. 

The subject of ' The Shipwreck,' and the fate of its author, 
bespeak an uncommon partiality in its favour. If we pay respect 
to the ingenious scholar who can produce agreeable verses amidst 
the shades of retirement, or the shelves of his library, how much 
more interest must we take in the *' ship-boy on the high and 
giddy mast," cherishing refined visions of fancy at the hour 
which he may casually snatch from fatigue and danger ! Nor 
did Falconer neglect the proper acquirements of seamanship in 
cultivating poetry, but evinced considerable knowledge of his 
profession, both in his ' Marine Dictionary' and in the nautical 
precepts of ' The Shipwreck.' In that poem he may be said to 
have added a congenial and peculiarly British subject to the lan- 
guage ; at least we had no previous poem of any length of which 
the characters and catastrophe were purely naval. 

The scene of the catastrophe (though he followed only the 
fact of his own history) was poetically laid amidst seas and shores 
where the mind easily gathers romantic associations, and where 
it supposes the most picturesque vicissitudes of scenery and 
climate. The spectacle of a majestic British ship on the shores 
of Greece brings as strong a reminiscence to the mind as can 

* [The grandfather of the publisher of this volume.] 



294 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

well be imagined of the changes which time has wrought in 
transplanting the empire of arts and civilization. Falconer's 
characters are few ; but the calm sagacious commander, and the 
rough obstinate Rodmond, are well contrasted. Some part of 
the love-story of Palemon is rather swainish and protracted, 
yet the effect of his being involved in the calamity leaves a 
deeper sympathy in the mind for the daughter of Albert, when 
we conceive her at once deprived both of a father and a lover. 
The incidents of ' The Shipwreck,' like those of a well-wrought 
tragedy, gradually deepen, while they yet leave a suspense of 
hope and fear to the imagination. In the final scene there is 
something that deeply touches our compassion in the picture of 
the unfortunate man who is struck blind by a flash of lightning 
at the helm. I remember, by the way, to have met with an 
affecting account of the identical calamity befalling the steers- 
man of a forlorn vessel in a similar moment given in a prose and 
veracious history of the loss of a vessel on the coast of America. 
Falconer skilfully heightens this trait by showing its effect on 
the commiseration of Rodmond, the roughest of his characters, 
who guides the victim of misfortune to lay hold of a sail. 

" A flash, quick glancing on the nerves of light, 
Struck the pale helmsman -with eternal night : 
Rodmond, who heard a piteous groan behind, 
Touch'd with compassion, gazed upon the blind ; 
And, while around his sad companions crowd. 
He guides th' unhappy victim to the shroud. 
Hie thee aloft ! ray gallant friend, he cries ; 
Thy only succour on the mast relies !" 

The effect of some of his sea-phrases is to give a definite and - 

authentic character to his descriptions ; but that of most of them, 

to a landsman's ear, resembles slang, and produces obscurity. 

His diction, too, generally abounds with commonplace expletives' 

and feeble lines. His scholarship on the shores of Greece is only* 

what we should accept of from a seaman ; but his poem has the^ 

sensible charm of appearing a transcript of reality, and leaves an 

impression of truth and nature on the mind.* 

* [Thy woes, Arion ! and thy simple tale, 
O'er all the heart shall triumph and prevail ! 
Charm'd as they read the verse too sadly true. 
How gallant Albert and his weary crew 
Heaved all their guns, their foundering bark to save. 
And toil'd — and shriek'd — and perish'd on the wave ! 1 

Campbell, The Pleasures of HopeJ] 



AKENSIDE. 295 



MARK AKENSIDE. 

[Born, 1721. Died, 1770.] 

It may be easy to point out in Akenside a superfluous pomp of 
expression ; yet the character which Pope bestowed on him, 
"that he was not an e very-day writer,"* is certainly apparent in 
the decided tone of his moral sentiments, and in his spirited main- 
tenance of great principles. His verse has a sweep of harmony 
that seems to accord with an emphatic mind. He encountered 
in his principal poem the more than ordinary difficulties of a 
didactic subject — 

" To paint the finest features of the mind, 
And to most subtle and mysterious things 
Give colour, strength, and motion." — Book i. 

The object of his work was to trace the various pleasures which 
we receive from nature and art to their respective principles in 
the human imagination, and to show the connexion of those 
principles with the moral dignity of man, and the final purposes 
of his creation. His leading speculative ideas are derived from 
Plato, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Hutchinson. To Addison he 
has been accused of being indebted for more than he acknow- 
ledged ; but surely in plagiarisms from ' The Spectator ' it might 
be taken for granted that no man could have counted on con- 
cealment ; and there are only three passages (I think) in his 
poem where his obligations to that source are worthy of notice, t 
Independent of these, it is true that he adopted Addison's three- 
fold division of the sources of the pleasures of the imagination ; 
but in doing so he properly followed a theory which had the 
advantage of being familiar to the reader ; and when he after- 
wards substituted another, in recasting his poem, he profited 
nothing by the change. In the purely ethical and didactic parts 

* ["VMiile he was yet unknown.] 

t Viz., in his comparison of the Votary of Imagination to a knight- 
errant, in some enchanted paradise, * Pleasures of Imagination,' book iii. 
1. 507 ; in his sketch of the village matron, book i. 1. 255 ; and in a passage 
of book iii., at line 379, beginning, "But were not nature thus endowed at 
large." His idea of the final cause of our delight in the vast and illimit- 
able is the same with one expressed in 'The Spectator,' No. 413. But 
Addison and he borrowed it in common from the sublime theology of Plato. 
The leading hint of his well-known passage, " Say why was man so emi- 
nently raised," &c., is avowedly taken from Longinus. 



296 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

of his subject he displays a high zeal of classical feeling, and a 
graceful development of the philosophy of taste. Though his 
metaphysics may not be always invulnerable, his general ideas of 
moral truth are lofty and prepossessing. He is peculiarly eloquent 
in those passages in which he describes the final causes of our 
emotions of taste ; he is equally skilful in delineating the pro- 
cesses of memory and association ; and he gives an animated 
view of Genius collecting her stores for works of excellence. 
All his readers must recollect with what a happy brilliancy he 
comes out in the simile of art and nature, dividing our admira- 
tion when he compares them to the double appearance of the sun 
distracting his Persian worshipper. But " non satis est pulchra 
esse poemata dulcia sunto" The sweetness which we miss in 
Akenside is that which should arise from the direct representa- 
tions of life, and its warm realities and affections. We seem to 
pass in his poem through a gallery of pictured abstractions 
rather than of pictured things. He reminds us of odours which 
we enjoy artificially extracted from the flower instead of inhaling 
them from its natural blossom. It is true that his object was to 
teach and explain the nature of mind, and that his subject led 
him necessarily into abstract ideas, but it admitted also of copious 
scenes, full of solid human interest, to illustrate the philosophy 
which he taught. Poetry, whatever be its title, should not make 
us merely contemplate existence, but feel it over again. That 
descriptive skill which expounds to us the nature of our own 
emotions is rather a sedative than a stimulant to enthusiasm. 
The true poet renovates our emotions, and is not content with 
explaining them. Even in a philosophical poem on the Imagina- 
tion, Akenside might have given historical tablets of the power 
which he delineated ; but his illustrations for the most part only 
consist in general ideas fleetingly personified. There is but one 
pathetic passage (I think) in the whole poem, namely, that in 
which he describes the lover embracing the urn of his deceased 
mistress. On the subject of the passions, in Book ii., when our 
attention evidently expects to be disengaged from abstraction 
by spirited draughts illustrative of their influence, how much ar^ { 
we disappointed by the cold and tedious episode of Harmodius's 
vision, an allegory which is the more intolerable, because it pro- 
fesses to teach us resignation to the will of Heaven, by a fiction 
which neither imposes on the fancy nor commimicates a moral 



CHATTERTON. 297 



to the understanding ! Under the head of * Beauty ' he only 

personifies Beauty herself, and her image leaves upon the mind 

but a vague impression of a beautiful woman, who might have 

been anybody. He introduces indeed some illustrations under 

the topic of ridicule, but in these his solemn manner overlaying 

the levity of his subjects unhappily produces a contrast which 

approaches itself to the ridiculous. In treating of novelty he is 

rather more descriptive ; we have the youth breaking from 

domestic endearments in quest of knowledge, the sage over his 

midnight lamp, the virgin at her romance, and the village matron 

relating her stories of witchcraft. Short and compressed as those 

sketches are, they are still beautiful glimpses of reality, and it is 

expressly from observing the relief which they afford to his 

didactic and declamatory passages that we are led to wish that 

he had appealed more frequently to examples from nature. It 

is disagreeable to add, that, unsatisfactory as he is in illustrating 

the several parts of his theory, he ushers them in with great 

promises, and closes them with self-congratulation. He says, 

" Thus with a faithful aim have we presumed 
Adventurous to delineate nature's form," 

when, in fact, he has delineated very little of it. He raises 

triumphal arches for the entrance and exit of his subject, and 

then sends beneath them a procession of a few individual ideas. 

He altered the poem in maturer life, but with no accession to 

its powers of entertainment. Harmodius was indeed dismissed, 

as well as the philosophy of ridicule ; but the episode of Solon 

was left unfinished, and the whole work made rather more dry 

and scholastic; and he had even the bad taste, I believe, to 

mutilate some of those fine passages, which, in their primitive 

state, are still deservedly admired and popular. 



THOMAS CHATTERTON. 

[Born, Nov. 20, 1752. Died, Aug. 25, 1770 ; 

AGED SEVENTEEN YEARS, NINE MONTHS. AND A FEW DAYS.]* 

Thomas Chatterton was the posthumous child of the master 
of a free-school in Bristol. At five years of age he was sent to 

* [O, early ripe ! to thy abundant store 
What could advancing age have added more ? 

Dryden of Oldham.'] 



298 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

the same school which his father had taught; but he made so 
little improvement that his mother took him back, nor could he 
be induced to learn his letters till his attention had been acci- 
dentally struck by the illuminated capitals of a French musical 
MS. His mother afterwards taught him to read from an old 
black-letter Bible. One of his biographers has expressed sur- 
prise that a person in his mother's rank of life should have been 
acquainted with black-letter. The writer might have known 
that books of the ancient type continued to be read in that rank 
of life long after they had ceased to be used by persons of 
higher station. At the age of eight he was put to a charity- 
school in Bristol, where he was instructed in reading, writing, 
and arithmetic. From his tenth year he discovered an extraor- 
dinary passion for books ; and, before he was twelve, had perused 
about seventy volumes, chiefly on history and divinity. The 
prematurity of his mind, at the latter period, was so strongly 
marked in a serious and religious cast of thought as to induce 
the bishop to confirm him and admit him to the sacrament at 
that early age. His piety, however, was not of long duration. 
He had also written some verses sufficiently wonderful for his 
years, and had picked up some knowledge of music and drawing, 
when, at the age of fourteen, he was bound apprentice to a Mr. 
Lambert, a scrivener, in his native city. In Mr. Lambert's 
house his situation was very humble ; he ate wdth the servants, 
and slept in the same room with the footboy ; but his employ- 
ments left him many hours of leisure for reading, and these he 
devoted to acquiring a knowledge of English antiquities and 
obsolete language, which, together with his poetical ingenuity, 
proved sufficient for his Rowleian fabrications. 

It was in the year 1768 that he first attracted attention. On 
the occasion of the new bridge of Bristol being opened, he sent 
to Farley's ' Journal,' in that city, a letter, signed Dunhelmus 
Bristoliensis, containing an account of a procession of friars, and 
of other ceremonies, which had taken place, at a remote period, 
when the old bridge had been opened. The account was said fco 
be taken from an ancient MS. Curiosity was instantly excited ; 
and the sages of Bristol, with a spirit of barbarism which the 
monks and friars of the fifteenth century could not easily have 
rivalled, having traced the letter to Chatterton, interrogated 
him, with threats, about the original. Boy as he was, be 



CHATTERTON. 299 



haughtily refused to explain upon compulsion ; but by milder 
treatment was brought to state that he had found the MS. in 
his mother's house. The true part of the history of those 
ancient papers, from M'hich he pretended to have derived this 
original of Farley's letter, as well as his subsequent poetical 
treasures, was, that in the muniment-room of Ht. Mary Red- 
cliffe church, of Bristol, several chests had been anciently 
deposited, among which was one called the " Cofre " of Mr. 
Canynge, an eminent merchant of Bristol, who had rebuilt the 
church in the reign of Edward IV. About the year 1727 those 
chests had been broken open by an order from proper autho- 
rity : some ancient deeds had been taken out, and the remaining 
MSS. left exposed as of no value. Chatterton's father, whose 
uncle was sexton of the church, had carried off great numbers 
of the parchments, and had used them as covers for books in 
his school. Amidst the residue of his father's ravages, Chat- 
terton gave out that he had found many writings of Mr. 
Canynge, and of Thomas Rowley (the friend of Canynge), a 
priest of the fifteenth century. The rumour of his discoveries 
occasioned his acquaintance to be sought by a few individuals 
of Bristol, to whom he made presents of vellum MSS. of pro- 
fessed antiquity. The first who applied to him was a Mr. Cat- 
cott, who obtained from him ' The Bristowe Tragedy,' and 
Rowley's ' Epitaph ' on Canynge's ancestor, Mr. Barret, a 
surgeon, who was writing a history of Bristol, was also pre- 
sented with some of the poetry of Rowley ; and Mr. Burgum, a 
pewterer, was favoured with * The Romaunt of the Knyghte,' a 
poem, said by Chatterton to have been written by the pewterer's 
ancestor, John de Berghura, about 450 years before. The be- 
lieving presentees, in return, supplied him with small sums of 
money, lent him books, and introduced him into society. Mr. 
Barret even gave him a few slight instructions in his own profes- 
sion. Chatterton's spirit and ambition perceptibly increased ; 
and he used to talk to his mother and sisters of his prospects of 
^me and fortune, always promising that they should be partakers 
'in his success.* 



' * [Nothing can be more extraordinary than the delight which Chatterton 
^pears to have felt in executing these numberless and multifarious imposi- 
tions. His ruling passion was not the vanity of a poet who depends upon 
the opinion of others for its gratification, but the stoical pride of talent, 
•which felt nourishment in the solitary contemplation of superiority over the 



300 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

Having deceived several incompetent judges with regard to 
his MSS., he next ventured to address himself to Horace Wal- 
pole, to whom he sent a letter, offering to supply him with an 
account of a series of eminent painters who had flourished at 
Bristol. Walpole returned a polite answer, desiring farther in- 
formation ; on which Chatterton transmitted to him some of his 
Rowleian poetry, described his own servile situation, and re- 
quested the patronage of his correspondent. The virtuoso, how- 
ever, having shown the poetical specimens to Gray and Mason, 
who pronounced them to be forgeries, sent the youth a cold 
reply, advising him to apply to the business of his profession. 
Walpole set out soon after for Paris, and neglected to return 
the MSS. till they had been twice demanded back by Chatterton, 
the second time in a very indignant letter. On these circum- 
stances was founded the whole charge that was brought against 
Walpole, of blighting the prospects, and eventually contributing 
to the ruin, of the youthful genius. Whatever may be thought 
of some expressions respecting Chatterton which Walpole em- 
ployed in the explanation of the affair which he afterwards 
published, the idea of taxing him with criminality in neglecting 
him was manifestly unjust. But in all cases of misfortune, the 
first consolation to which human nature resorts is, right or 
wrong, to find somebody to blame ; and an evil seems to be half 
cured when it is traced to an object of indignation. 

In the mean time, Chatterton had commenced a correspond- 
ence with ^ The Town and Country Magazine ' in London, to 
which he transmitted several communications on subjects re- 
lating to English antiquities, besides his specimens of Rowley's 
poetry, and fragments, purporting to be translations of Saxon 
poems, written in the measured prose of Macpherson's style. 
His poetical talent also continued to develop itself in several 
pieces of verse, avowedly original, though in a manner less 
pleasing than in his feigned relics of the Gothic Muse. When 

dupes who fell into his toils. He has himself described this leading feature 
of his character in a letter to Mr. Barret : " It is my pride, my damned, 
native, unconquerable pride, that plunges me into distraction. You must 
know that 19-20ths of my composition is pride. I must either live a slave — 
a servant — have no will of my own which I may fairly declare as such, or 
die." — Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Works, vol. xvii. p. 231. 

" I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy. 
The sleepless soul that perish'd in his pride." 

Wordsworth.] 



CHATTERTON. 301 



we conceive the inspired boy transporting himself in imagination 
back to the days of his fictitious Rowley, embodying his ideal 
character, and giving to airy nothing a " local habitation and a 
name," we may forget the impostor in the enthusiast, and forgive 
the falsehood of his reverie for its beauty and ingenuity. One 
of his companions has described the air of rapture and inspira- 
tion with which he used to repeat his passages from Rowley, and 
the delight which he took to contemplate the church of St. 
Mary RedclifFe, while it awoke the associations of antiquity in 
his romantic mind. There was one spot in particular, full in 
view of the church, where he would often lay himself down, and 
fix his eyes, as it were, in a trance. On Sundays, as long as 
daylight lasted, he would walk alone in the country around 
Bristol, taking drawings of churches, or other objects that 
struck his imagination. The romance of his character is some- 
what disenchanted when we find him in his satire of ' Kew 
Gardens,' which he wrote before leaving Bristol, indulging in 
the vulgar scandal of the day upon the characters of the 
Princess Dowager of "Wales and Lord Bute, whatever proofs 
such a production may afford of the quickness and versatility of 
his talents. 

As he had not exactly followed Horace Walpole's advice 
with regard to moulding his inclinations to business, he felt the 
irksomeness of his situation in Mr. Lambert's office at last in- 
tolerable ; and he vehemently solicited and obtained the attor- 
ney's consent to release him from his apprenticeship. His master 
is said to have been alarmed into this concession by the hints 
which Chatterton gave of his intention to destroy himself; but 
even without this fear, Mr. Lambert could have no great motive 
to detain so reluctant an apprentice from the hopes of his future 
services. 

In the month of April, 1770, Chatterton arrived in London, 
aged seventeen years and five months. He immediately received 
from the booksellers, with whom he had already corresponded, 
several important literary engagements. He projected a ' His- 
tory of England' and a 'History of London,' wrote for the 
magazines and newspapers, and contributed songs for the public 
gardens. But party politics soon became his favourite object, 
as they flattered his self-importance, and were likely to give the 
most lucrative employment to his pen. His introduction to one 



302 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

or two individuals, who noticed him on this account, seems to 
have filled his ardent and sanguine fancy with unbounded pros- 
pects of success. Among these acquaintances was the Lord 
Mayor Beckford, and it is not unlikely, if that magistrate had 
not died soon after, that Chatterton might have found a patron. 
His death, however, and a little experience, put an end to the 
young adventurer's hopes of making his fortune by writing in 
hostility to government; and, with great accommodation of prin- 
ciple, he addressed a letter to Lord North in praise of his 
administration. There was, perhaps, more levity than profligacy 
in this tergiversation,* though it must be owned that it was not 
the levity of an ingenuous boy. 

During the few months of his existence in London, his letters 
to his mother and sister, which were always accompanied with 
presents, expressed the most joyous anticipations. But suddenly 
all the flush of his gay hopes and busy projects terminated in 
despair. The particular causes which led to his catastrophe 
have not been distinctly traced. His own descriptions of his 
prospects were but little to be trusted ; for while apparently 
exchanging his shadowy visions of Rowley for the real adven- 
tures of life, he was still moving under the spell of an ima- 
gination that saw everything in exaggerated colours. Out of 
this dream he was at length awakened, when he found that he 
had miscalculated the chances of patronage and the profits of 
literary labour. The abortive attempt which he made to obtain : 
the situation of a surgeon's mate on board an African vessel 
shows that he had abandoned the hopes of gaining a livelihood 
by working for the booksellers, tliough he was known to have 
shrewdly remarked that they were not the worst patrons of 
merit. After this disappointment his poverty became extreme*? 
and though there is an account of a gentleman having sent hint 
a guinea within tlie few last days of his life, yet there is too 
much reason to fear that the pangs of his voluntary death wer6 
preceded by the actual sufferings of want. Mrs. Angel, a sack- 
maker, in Brook-street, Holborn, in whose house he lodged^ 
offered him a dinner the day before his death, knowing that he 

* [Mr. Campbell has borrowed the expression from Chalmers's * Life.' " To 
call," says Mr. Southey, " Chatterton's boyish essays, iu political controversy, 
political tergivei-sation, is as prepostei-ous an abuse of language as it -wooid 
be to call Mr. Chalmers a judicious critic or a candid biographer." — Qitar, 
jRev.y vol. xi. p. 494.] 



CHATTERTON. 303 



had fasted a long time ; but his pride made him refuse it with 
some indignation. On the 25th of August he was found dead 
in his bed from the effects of poison which he had swallowed. 
He was interred in a shell in the burial-ground of Shoe-lane 
workhouse. 

The heart which can peruse the fate of Chatterton without 
being moved is little to be envied for its tranquillity ; but the 
intellects of those men must be as deficient as their hearts are 
uncharitable, who, confounding all shades of moral distinction, 
have ranked his literary fiction of Rowley in the same class of 
crimes with pecuniary forgery, and have calculated that, if he 
had not died by his own hand, he would have probably ended 
his days upon a gallows. This disgusting sentence has been 
pronounced upon a youth who was exemplary for severe study, 
temperance, and natural affection. His Rowleian forgery must, 
indeed, be pronounced improper by the general law which con- 
demns all falsifications of history ; but it deprived no man of 
his fame, it had no sacrilegious interference with the memory 
of departed genius, it had not, like Lauder's imposture, any 
malignant motive to rob a party or a country of a name which 
was its pride and ornament.* 

Setting aside the opinion of those uncharitable biographers 
whose imaginations have conducted him to the gibbet, it may be 
owned that his unformed character exhibited strong and con- 
flicting elements of good and evil. Even the momentary pro- 
ject of the infidel boy to become a Methodist preacher betrays 
an obliquity of design, and a contempt of human credulity, that 
is not very amiable. But had he been spared, his pride and 
ambition would have come to flow in their proper channels, his 
understanding would have taught him the practical value of 
truth and the dignity of virtue, and he would have despised 
artifice when he had felt the strength and security of wisdom. 
In estimating the promises of his genius, I would rather lean 

* [Nor is Chatterton's imposition reprehensible like Ireland's forgeries, 
for no real name or fame suffered as Shakspeare's might have suffered. A 
real Rowley, such as Chatterton gave birth to, never existed till he wrote, 
and no poet ^between Chaucer and Spenser but might own with pride the 
productions of the boy " of Bristowe." Lauder's imposture went to degrade 
a great author, Ireland's to make another write as only an Ireland could have 
written, but Chatterton's to make a new poet to advance the glory of his 
native city and of his nation at large. " The deception," says Southey, ** was 
not intended to defraud or injure one human being."] 



304 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

to the utmost enthusiasm of his admirers, than to the cold 
opinion of those who are afraid of being blinded to the defects 
of the poems attributed to Kowley by the veil of obsolete 
phraseology which is thrown over them. If we look to the 
ballad of ' Sir Charles Bawdin,' and translate it into modern 
English, we shall find its strength and interest to have no de- 
pendence on obsolete words. In the striking passage of the 
martyr Bawdin, standing erect in bis car to rebuke Edward, 
who beheld him from the window, when 

" The tyrant's soul rush'd to his face," 
and when he exclaimed, 

" Behold the man ! he speaks the truth, 
He's greater than a king ;" — 

in these, and in all the striking parts of the ballad, no effect is 

owing to mock antiquity, but to the simple and high conception 

of a great and just character, who 

" Summ'd the actions of the day 
Each night before he slept." 

What a moral portraiture from the hand of a boy ! The in- 
equality of Cliatterton's various productions may be compared 
to the disproportions of the ungrown giant. His works had 
nothing of the definite neatness of that precocious talent which 
stops short in early maturity. His thirst for knowledge was that 
of a being taught by instinct to lay up materials for the exercise 
of great and undeveloped powers. Even in his favourite maxim, 
pushed it might be to hyperbole, that a man by abstinence and 
perseverance might accomplish whatever he pleased, may be 
traced the indications of a genius which nature had meant to 
achieve works of immortality. Tasso alone can be compared to 
him as a juvenile prodigy.* No English poet ever equalled him ^ 
at the same age. 



CHRISTOPHER SMART. 

[Born, 1722. Died, 1770.] 

Christopher Smart was born at Shipbourne, in Kent. Being 
an eight months' child, he had from his birth an infirm consti- 
tution, which unfortunately his habits of life never tended to 

* In the verses which Tasso sent to his mother when he was nine years 
old. 



SMAET. 305 



strengthen. His father, who was steward of the Kentish estates 
of Lord Barnard (afterwards Earl of Darlington), possessed a 
property in the neighbourhood of Shipbourne of about 300/. a 
year ; but it was so much encumbered by debt that his widow 
was obliged to sell it at his death at a considerable loss. This 
happened in our poet's eleventh year, at which time he was taken 
from the school of Maidstone, in Kent, and placed at that of 
Durham. Some of his paternal relations resided in the latter 
place. An ancestor of the family, Mr. Peter Smart, had been a 
prebendary of Durham in the reign of Charles I., and was re- 
garded by the Puritans as a proto-martyr in their cause, having 
been degraded, fined, and imprisoned for eleven years, on account 
of a Latin poem which he published in 1643, and which the 
high-church party chose to consider as a libel. What services 
young Smart met with at Durham from his father's relations we 
are not informed ; but he was kindly received by Lord Barnard, 
at his seat of Raby Castle ; and through the interest of his lord- 
ship's family obtained the patronage of the Duchess of Cleveland, 
who allowed him for several years an annuity of forty pounds. In 
his seventeenth year he went from the school of Durham to the 
University of Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship of Pem- 
broke Hall, and took the degree of master of arts. About the 
time of his obtaining his fellowship he wrote a farce, entitled 
' The Grateful Fair, or the Trip to Cambridge,' which was acted 
in the hall of his college. Of this production only a few songs 
and the mock-heroic soliloquy of the Princess Periwinkle have 
been preserved ; but from the draught of the plot given by his 
biographer the comic ingenuity of the piece seems not to have 
been remarkable. He distinguished himself at the university 
both by his Latin and English verses : among the former was his 
translation of Pope's * Ode on St. Cecilia's Day,' on the subject 
of which, and of other versions which he projected from the same 
author, he had the honour of corresponding with Pope. He also 
obtained, during several years, the Seatonian prize for poetical 
essays on the attributes of the Deity. He afterwards printed 
those compositions, and probably rested on them his chief claims 
to the name of a poet. In one of them he rather too loftily de- 
nominates himself " the poet of his God" From his verses upon 
* The Eagle chained in a College Court,' in which he addresses 
the bird. 



306 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

" Thou type of wit and sense, confined, 
Chain' d by th' oppressors of the mind," 

it does not appear that he had great respect for his college 
teachers ; nor is it pretended that the oppressors of the mind, els 
he calls them, had much reason to admire the application of his 
eagle genius to the graver studies of the university ; for the life 
which he led was so dissipated as to oblige him to sequester his 
fellowship for tavern debts. 

In the year 1753 he quitted college, upon his marriage with a 
Miss Carnan, the stepdaughter of Mr. Newbery, the bookseller. 
With Newbery he had already been engaged in several schemes 
of authorship, having been a frequent contributor to ' The 
Student, or Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany/ and having 
besides conducted * The Midwife, or Old "Woman's Magazine.' 
He had also published a collection of his poems ; and having 
either detected or suspected that the notorious Sir John (for- 
merly Dr.) Hill had reviewed them unfavourably, he proclaimed 
war with the paper knight, and wrote a satire on him, entitled 
*The Hilliad.' One of the bad effects of 'The Dunciad' had 
been to afford to indignant witlings an easily copied example of 
allegory and vituperation. Every versifier who could echo 
Pope's numbers, and add an iad to the name of the man or 
thing that offended him, thought himself a Pope for the time 
being, and, however dull, an hereditary champion against the 
powers of Dulness. Sir John Hill, who wrote also a book upon 
Cookery, replied in a ' Smartiad ;' and probably both of his 
books were in their different ways useful to the pastry-cooks. li 
the town was interested in such a warfare, it was to be pitied for 
the dearth of amusement. But though Smart was thus engaged, 
his manners were so agreeable and his personal character so in- 
offensive as to find friends among some of the most eminent mer 
of his day, such as Dr. Johnson, Garrick, and Dr. Burney.*^ 
Distress brought on by imprudence, and insanity produced hf 
distress, soon made him too dependent on the kindness of hi'' 
friends. Some of them contributed money, Garrick gave him ? 
free benefit at Drury Lane Theatre, and Dr. Johnson fumishecP 
him with several papers for one of his periodical publications 
During the confinement which his alienation of mind renderec 
necessary, he was deprived of pen and ink and paper ; and usee 
to indent his poetical thoughts with a key on the wainscot of th« 



GRAY. 307 



jwall. On his recovery he resumed his literary employments, 

j and for some time conducted himself with industry. Among the 

! compositions of his saner period was a verse translation of the 

; Fables of Phaedrus, executed with tolerable spirit and accuracy. 

! But he gave a lamentable proof of his declining powers in his 

I translation of the Psalms and in his ' Parables of Jesus Christ, 

! done into familiar verse,' which were dedicated to Master Bonnel 

i Thornton, a child in the nursery. He was also committed for 

I debt to the King's Bench prison, within the rules of which he 

■ died, after a short illness, of a disorder in the liver. 

1 If Smart had any talent above mediocrity, it was a slight turn 

jfor humour.* In his serious attempts at poetry, he reminds ^ls 

of those 

" whom Phoebus in his ire 
Hath blasted with poetic fire." 

The history of his life is but melancholy. Such was his 

habitual imprudence that he would bring home guests to dine at 

his house, when his wife and family had neither a meal nor 

money to provide one. He engaged, on one occasion, to write 

'! ' The Universal Visitor,* and for no other work, by a contract 

,j which was to last ninety -nine years. The publication stopped at 

the end of two years. During his bad health he was advised to 

walii for exercise, and he used to walk for that purpose to the 

alehouse ; but he was always carried back. 



THOMAS GRAY. 

[Born, 1716. Died, 1771.] 

Mr. Matthias, the accomplished editor of Gray, in delineating 

his poetical character, dwells with peculiar emphasis on the 

charm of his lyrical versification, which he justly ascribes to the 

naturally exquisite ear of the poet having been trained to con- 

• summate skill in harmony, by long familiarity with the finest 

models in the most poetical of all languages, the Greek and 

Italian. " He was indeed," says Mr. Matthias, " the inventor, 

;i it may be strictly said so, of a new lyrical metre in his own 

i tongue. The peculiar formation of his strophe, antistrophe, and 

1 * An instance of his wit is given in his extemporary spondaic on the 
j three fat beadles of the university : — 

' " Pinguia tergemiaorum abdomina bedellorum.'' 

x2 



LIVES OF THE POETS. 



epode was unknown before him ; and it could only have been 
planned and perfected by a master genius, who was equally 
skilled by long and repeated study, and by transfusion into his 
own mind of the lyric compositions of ancient Greece and of the ; 
higher ' canzoni * of the Tuscan poets, ' di maggior car me Ci 
mono^ as it is termed in the commanding energy of their lan- 
guage. Antecedent to * The Progress of Poetry ' and to ^ The, 
Bard,* no such lyrics had appeared. There is not an ode in the: 
English language which is constructed like these two compo-i 
sitions ; with such power, such majesty, and such sweetness, with; 
such proportioned pauses and just cadences, with such regulated^ 
measures of the verse, with such master principles of IjTical arta 
displayed and exemplified, and, at the same time, with such 
concealment of the difficulty, which is lost in the softness and,' 
uninterrupted flowing of the lines in each stanza, with such 
musical magic, that every verse in it in succession dwells on thej 
ear and harmonizes with that which has gone before." 

So far as the versification of Gray is concerned, I have toqi 
much pleasure in transcribing these sentiments of Mr. Matthias 
to encumber them with any qualifying remarks of my own on 
that particular subject ; but I dissent from him in his more, 
general estimate of Gray's genius, when he afterwards speaks oi 
it as " second to none." 

In order to distinguish the positive merits of Gray from the: 
loftier excellence ascribed to him by his editor, it is unnecessary 
to resort to the criticisms of Dr. Johnson. Some of them majt 
be just, but their general spirit is malignant and exaggerated^ 
When we look to such beautiful passages in Gray's odes as hi^ 
Indian poet amidst the forests of Chili, or his prophet bard scat< 
tering dismay on the array of Edward and his awestruck chiefs 
tains on the side of Snowdon — when we regard his elegant taste? 
not only gathering classical flowers from the Arno and Ilyssusr 
but revealing glimpses of barbaric grandeur amidst the darknesi 
of Runic mythology — when we recollect his " thoughts thm 
breathe^ and words that burn " — his rich personifications, hU. 
broad and prominent images, and the crowning charm of h^; 
versification, we may safely pronounce that Johnson's critica 
falminations have passed over his lyrical character with more 
noise than destruction. 

At the same time it must be recollected that his beauties arc 



GRAY. 309 



rather crowded into a short compass than numerous in their 
absolute sum. The spirit of poetry, it is true, is not to be com- 
puted mechanically by tale or measure ; and abundance of it may 
enter into a very small bulk of language. But neither language 
nor poetry are compressible beyond certain limits ; and the poet 
whose thoughts have been concentrated into a few page^ cannot 
be expected to have given a very full or interesting image of life 
in his compositions. A few odes, splendid, spirited, and harmo- 
nious, but by no means either faultless or replete with subjects 
that come home to universal sympathy, and an Elegy, unrivalled 
as it is in that species of composition, — these achievements of our 
poet form, after all, no such extensive grounds of originality as 
to entitle their author to be spoken of as in genius '' second to 
none.'* He had not, like Goldsmith, the art of unbending from 
grace to levity. Nothing can be more unexhilarating than his 
attempts at wit and humour, either in his letters or lighter poetry. 
In his graver and better strains some of the most exquisite ideas 
are his own ; and his taste, for the most part, adorned and skil- 
fully recast the forms of thought and expression which he bor- 
rowed from others. If his works often " whisper whence they 
stole their balmy spoils," it is not from plagiarism, but from a 
sensibility that sought and selected the finest impressions of 
genius from other gifted minds. But still there is a higher ap- 
pearance of culture than fertility, of acquisition than originality, 
in Gray. He is not that being of independent imagination, that 
native and creative spirit, of whom we should say that he would 
have plunged into the flood of poetry had there been none to 
leap before him. Nor were his learned acquisitions turned to 
the very highest account. He was the architect of no poetical 
design of extensive or intricate compass. One noble historical 
picture, it must be confessed, he has left in the opening scene of 
his * Bard ;' and the sequel of that ode, though it is not perhaps 
the most interesting prophecy of English history which we could 
suppose Inspiration to pronounce, contains many richly poetical 
Conceptions. It is, however, exclusively in the opening of ' The 
Bard ' that Gray can be ever said to have portrayed a grand, dis- 
tinct, and heroic scene of fiction.* 

* [Gray's Elegy pleased instantly and eternally. His Odes did not, nor 
do they yet, please like his Elegy. — Byron, Works, vol. v. p. 15. 
Had Gray written nothing but his Elegy, high as he stan^, I am not sure 



310 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

The obscurity so often objected to him is certainly a defect 
not to be justified by the authority of Pindar, more than anything 
else that is intrinsically objectionable. But it has been exagge 
rated. He is nowhere so obscure as not to be intelligible by re 
curring to the passage. And it may be further observed, that 
Gray's lyrical obscurity never arises, as in some writers, from 
undefined ideas or paradoxical sentiments. On the contrary, his 
moral spirit is as explicit as it is majestic ; and, deeply read as he 
was in Plato, he is never metaphysically perplexed. The fault 
of his meaning is to be latent, not indefinite or confused. When 
we give his beauties re-perusal and attention, they kindle and 
multiply to the view. The thread of association that conducts to 
his remote allusions, or that connects his abrupt transitions, 
ceases then to be invisible. His lyrical pieces are like paintings 
on glass, which must be placed in a strong light to give out the 
perfect radiance of their colouring. 



CUTHBERT SHAW. 

[Born, 1738. Died, 1771.] 

CuTHBERT Shaw was the son of a shoemaker, and was born ati 
Ravensworth, near Richmond, in Yorkshire. He was for some; 
time usher to the grammar-school at Darlington, M'here he pub- 
lished, in 1756, his first poem, entitled ' Liberty.' He afterwards' 
appeared in London and other places as a player ; but having no 
recommendations for the stage, except a handsome figure, hei 
betook himself to writing for subsistence. In 1762 iie attacked 
Colman, Churchill, Lloyd, and Shirley, in a satire called ' Thei 
Four Farthing Candles ;' * and next selected the author of ' The 
Posciad ' as the exclusive subject of a mock-heroic poem, en- 
titled ' The Race, by Mercurius Spur, with Notes by Faustinas 
Scriblerus.' He had for some time the care of instructing ani 
infant son of the Earl of Chesterfield in the first rudiments of 
learning. He married a woman of superior connexions, who, for 
his sake, forfeited the countenance of her family, but who did 
not live long to share his aflfections and misfortunes. Her death,! 

that he would not stand higher ; it is the corner-stone of his glory ; without 
it, his Odes would be insufficient for his fame. — Byron, Works, vol. vi. p. 
569.] 
* TA poem of which no copy is known to exist] 



SHAW— SMOLLETT. 311 



in 1768, and tliat of their infant, occasioned those well-known 
verses which give an interest to his memory. Lord Lyttelton, 
struck by their feeling expression of a grief similar to his own, 
solicited his acquaintance, and distinguished him by his praise, 
but rendered him no substantial assistance. The short remainder 
of his days was spent in literary drudgery. He wrote a satire on 
political corruption, with many other articles, which appeared in 
' The Freeholder's Magazine.' Disease and dissipation carried 
him off in the prime of life, after the former had left irretrievable 
marks of its ravages upon his countenance. 



TOBIAS SMOLLETT. 

[Bom, 1721. Died, 1771.] 

Tobias Smollett was the grandson of Sir James Smollett, of 
Bonhill, a member of the Scottish parliament, and one of the 
commissioners for the Union. The father of the novelist was 
a younger son of the knight, and had married without his con- 
sent. He died in the prime of life, and left his children de- 
pendent on their grandfather. Were we to trust to Roderick 
Random's account of his relations for authentic portraits of the 
author's family, we should entertain no very prepossessing idea 
of the old gentleman ; but it appears that Sir James Smollett 
supported his son and educated his grandchildren. 

Smollett was born near Renton, in the parish of Cardross, and 
shire of Dumbarton, and passed his earliest years among those 
scenes on the banks of the Leven which he has described with 
some interest in ^ The Adventures of Humphrey Clinker.' He 
received his first instructions in classical learning at the school 
of Dumbarton. He was afterwards removed to the college of 
Glasgow, where he pursued the study of medicine : and, accord- 
ing to the practice then usual in medical education, was bound 
apprentice to a Mr. Gordon, a surgeon in that city. Gordon is 
generally said to have been the original of Potion in ^ Roderick 
Random.' This has been denied by Smollett's biographers ; but 
their conjecture is of no more weight than the tradition which it 
contradicts. In the characters of a work so compounded of 
truth and fiction, the author alone could have estimated the per- 
sonality which he intended, and of that intention he was not 



312 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

probably communicative. The tradition still remaining at Glas- 
gow is, that Smollett was a restive apprentice and a mischievous 
stripling. While at the university he cultivated the study of 
literature, as well as of medicine, and showed a disposition for 
poetry, but very often in that bitter vein of satire which he 
carried so plentifully into the temper of his future years. He 
had also, before he was eighteen, composed a tragedy, entitled 
* The Regicide.' This tragedy was not published till after the 
lapse of ten years, and then it probably retained but little of its 
juvenile shape. When printed, " to shame the rogues" it was 
ushered in by a preface, abusing the stage-managers, who had 
rejected it, in a strain of indignation with which the perusal of 
the play itself did not dispose the reader to sympathise. 

The death of his grandfather left Smollett without provision, 
and obliged him to leave his studies at Glasgow prematurely. 
He came to London, and obtained the situation of a surgeon's 
mate on board a ship of the line, which sailed in the unfortunate 
expedition to Carthagena. The strong picture of the discomforts 
of his naval life, which he afterwards drew, is said to have at- 
tracted considerable attention to the internal economy of our 
ships of war, and to have occasioned the commencement of some 
salutary reformations. But with all the improvements which 
have been made, it is to be feared that the situation of an assistant 
surgeon in the navy is still left less respectable and comfortable 
than it ought to be made. He is still without equal advantages 
to those of a surgeon's mate in the army, and is put too low in 
the rank of officers. 

Smollett quitted the naval service in the West Indies, and re- 
sided for some time in Jamaica. He returned to London in 1746, 
and in the following year married a Miss Lascelles, whom he 
had courted in Jamaica, and with whom he had the promise of 
3000/. Of this sum, however, he obtained but a small part, and 
that after an expensive lawsuit. Being obliged therefore to have 
recourse to his pen for support, he, in 1748, published his ' Ro- 
derick Random,' the most popular of all the novels on which his ' 
high reputation rests. Three years elapsed before the appear- 
ance of ' Peregrine Pickle.' In the interval he had visited 
Paris, where his biographer, Dr. Moore, who knew him there, 
says that he indulged in the common prejudices of the English 
against the French nation, and never attained the language so 



SMOLLETT. 313 



perfectly as to be able to mix familiarly with the inhabitants. 
"When we look to the rich traits of comic effect which his English 
characters derive from transferring the scene to France, we can 
neither regard his journey as of slight utility to his powers of 
amusement, nor regret that he attended more to the follies of his 
countrymen than to French manners and phraseology. After 
the publication of ' Peregrine Pickle ' he attempted to establish 
himself at Bath as a physician, but was not successful. His 
failure has been attributed to the haughtiness of his manners. It 
is not very apparent, however, what claims to medical estimation 
he could advance ; and the celebrity for aggravating and ex- 
posing personal follies, which he had acquired by his novels, was 
rather too formidable to recommend him as a confidential visitant 
to the sick chambers of fashion. To a sensitive valetudinarian 
many diseases would be less alarming than a doctor who might 
slay the character by his ridicule, and might not save the body 
by his prescriptions. 

Returning disappointed from Bath, he fixed his residence at 
Chelsea, and supported himself during the rest of his life by his 
literary employments. The manner in which he lived at Chelsea, 
and the hospitality which he afibrded to many of his poorer 
brethren of the tribe of literature, have been somewhat osten- 
tatiously described by his own pen ;* but Dr. Moore assures us 
that the account of his liberality is not overcharged. In 1753 
he produced his novel of ' Count Fathom ;' and three years after- 
wards, whilst confined in prison for a libel on Admiral Knowles, 
amused himself with writing ' The Adventures of Sir Launcelot 
Greaves.' In the following year he attempted the stage in a 
farce, entitled ' The Reprisals,' which, though of no great value, 
met with temporary success. Prolific as his pen was, he seems 
from this period to have felt that he could depend for subsistence 
more securely upon works of industry than originality ; and he 
engaged in voluminous drudgeries, which added nothing to his 
fame, whilst they made inroads on his health and equanimity. 
His conduct of ' The Critical Review,' in particular, embroiled 
him in rancorous personalities, and brought forward the least 
agreeable parts of his character. He supported the ministry of 
Lord Bute with his pen, but missed the reward which he ex- 
pected. Though he had realised large sums by several of his 
* [In ' Humphrey Clinker.'] 



314 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

works, he saw the evening of his life approach with no provision 
in prospect but what he could receive from severe and continued 
labours ; and with him that evening might be said to approach 
prematurely, for his constitution seems to have begun to break 
down when he was not much turned of forty. The death of his 
only daughter obliged him to seek relief from sickness and me- 
lancholy by travelling abroad for two years ; and the Account 
of his Travels in France and Italy, which he published on his 
return, afforded a dreary picture of the state of his mind. Soon 
after his return from the Continent, his health still decaying, he 
made a journey to Scotland, and renewed his attachment to his 
friends and relations. His constitution again requiring a more 
genial climate, and as he could ill support the expense of travel- 
ling, his friends tried, in vain, to obtain for him from ministers 
the situation of consul at Nice, Naples, or Leghorn. Smollett 
had written both for and against ministers, perhaps not always 
from independent motives ; but to find the man whose genius has 
given exhilaration to millions thus reduced to beg, and to be re- 
fused the means that might have smoothed the pillow of his death- | 
bed in a foreign country, is a circumstance which fills the mind 
rather too strongly with the recollection of Cervantes. He set 
out, however, for Italy in 1 770, and, though debilitated in body, i 
was able to compose his novel of ' Humphrey Clinker.' After a 
few months' residence in the neighbourhood of Leghorn, he ex- 
pired there in his fifty-first year. 

The few poems which he has left have a portion of delicacy ■ 
which is not to be found in his novels ; but they have not, like 
those prose fictions, the strength of a master's hand. Were he 
to live over again, we might wish him to write more poetry, in | 
the belief that his poetical talent would improve by exercise ; 
but we should be glad to have more of his novels just as they 



GEORGE LORD LYTTELTON. 

[Born, 1709. Died, 1773.] 
This nobleman's public and private virtues, and his merits as the 

* [This passage is quoted by Sir Walter Scott in his ' Memoir of Smollett;' 
" The truth is," he adds, " that in these very novels are expended many of 
the ingredients both of grave and humorous poetry." 3fisc. Works, vol. iii. 
p. 176.] 



LORD LYTTELTON— FERGUSSON. 315 

historian of Henry II., will be remembered when his verses are 
forgotten. By a felicity very rare in his attempts at poetry, the 
kids and fawns of his ' Monody ' do not entirely extinguish all 
appearance of that sincere feeling with which it must have been 
composed. Gray, in a letter to Horace Walpole, has justly re- 
marked the beauty of the stanza beginning, " In vain I look 
around." " If it were all like this stanza," he continues, " I 
should be excessively pleased. Nature, and sorrow, and tender- 
ness, are the true genius of such things (monodies), and some- 
thing of these I find in several parts of it (not in the orange- 
tree). Poetical ornaments are foreign to the purpose, for they 
only show a man is not sorry ; and devotion is worse, for it 
teaches him that he ought not to be sorry, which is all the plea- 
sure of the thinsf."* 



'»• 



ROBERT FERGUSSON. 

[Born, 1750. Died, 1774.] 

This unfortunate young man, who died in a mad-house at the 
age of twenty-four, left some pieces of considerable humour and 
originality in the Scottish dialect. Burns, who took the hint of 
his ' Cotter's Saturday;Night ' from Fergusson's ' Farmer's Ingle,' 
seems to have esteemed him with an exaggerated partiality, which 
can only be accounted for by his having perused him in his 
youth. On his first visit to Edinburgh, Burns traced out the 
grave of Fergusson, and placed a headstone over it at his own 
expense, inscribed with verses of appropriate feeling. 

Fergusson was born at Edinburgh, where his father held the 
oflftce of accountant to the British Linen-hall. He was educated 
partly at the high-school of Edinburgh, and partly at the gram- 
mar-school of Dundee, after which a bursary, or exhibition, was 
obtained for him at the University of St. Andrew's, where he soon 
distinguished himself as a youth of promising genius. His eccen- 
tricity was, unfortunately, of equal growth with his talents ; and 
on one occasion, having taken part in an afiPray among the stu- 
dents that broke out at the distribution of the prizes, he was 
selected as one of the leaders, and expelled from college, but 

* [And in a letter to Wharton he says, " Have you seen Lyttelton's 
* Monody' on his wife's death ? There are parts of it too stiff and poetical, 
but others truly tender and elegiac as one would wish." — Works by Mitford^ 
vol. iii. p. 49.] 



316 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

was received back again upon promises of future good behaviour. 
On leaving college he found himself destitute by the death of 
his father ; and after a fruitless attempt to obtain support from 
an uncle at Aberdeen, he returned on foot to his mother's house 
at Edinburgh, half dead with the fatigue of the journey, which 
brought on an illness that had nearly proved fatal to his delicate 
frame. On his recovery he was received as a clerk in the com- 
missary clerk's office, where he did not continue long, but ex- 
changed it for the same situation in the office of the sheriff clerk, 
and there he remained as long as his health and habits admitted 
of any application to business. Had he possessed ordinary pru- 
dence, he might have lived by the drudgery of copying papers ; 
but the appearance of some of his poems having gained him a 
flattering notice, he was drawn into dissipated company, and be- 
came a wit, a songster, a mimic, and a free liver ; and finally, 
after fits of penitence and religious despondency, went mad. 
When committed to the receptacle of the insane, a consciousness 
of his dreadful fate seemed to come over him. At the moment 
of his entrance he uttered a wild cry of despair, which was re- 
echoed by a shout from all the inmates of the dismal mansion, 
and left an impression of inexpressible horror on the friends who 
had the task of attending him. His mother, being in extreme 
poverty, had no other mode of disposing of him. A remittance, 
which she received a few days after, from a more fortunate son 
who was abroad, would have enabled her to support the expense 
of affording him attendance in her own house ; but the aid did 
not arrive till the poor maniac had expired. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 

[Born, Nov. 10, 1728. Died, 1774.] 

Oliver Goldsmith was born at a place called Pallas, in the 
parish of Forney, and county of Longford, in Ireland. His 
father held the living of Kilkenny West, in the county of West- 
meath.* There was a tradition in the family that they Mere 
descended from Juan Romeiro, a Spanish gentleman, who had 
settled in Ireland in the sixteenth century, and had married a 
woman whose name of Goldsmith was adopted by their descend- 
* [His mother, by name Ann Jones, was married to Charles Goldsmith 
on the 4th of May, 1718.— Prior, vol. i. p. 14.] 



GOLDSMITH. 317 



ants. Oliver was instructed in reading and writing by Thomas 
Byrne, a schoolmaster in his father's parish, who had been a 
quartermaster in the wars of Queen Anne ; and who, being fond 
of relating his adventures, is supposed to have communicated to 
the young mind of his pupil the romantic and wandering dispo- 
sition which showed itself in his future years. He was next 
placed * under the Rev. Mr. Griffin, schoolmaster of Elphin, and 
was received into the house of his father's brother, Mr. Gold- 
smith, of Ballyoughter. Some relations and friends of his uncle, 
who were met on a social party, happening to be struck with 
the sprightliness of Oliver's abilities, and knowing the narrow 
circumstances of his father, offered to join in defraying the 
expense of giving him a liberal education. The chief contributor 
was the Rev. Thomas Contarine, who had married our poet's 
aunt. He was accordingly sent for some time to the school of 
Athlone, and afterwards to an academy at Edgeworthstown, 
where he was fitted for the university. He was admitted a sizer 
or servitor of Trinity College, Dublin, in his sixteenth year [11th 
June, 1745], a circumstance which denoted considerable profi- 
ciency ; and three years afterwards was elected one of the exhi- 
bitioners on the foundation of Erasmus Smith. f But though he 
occasionally distinguished himself by his translations from the 
classics, his general appearance at the university corresponded 
neither with the former promises nor future development of his 
talents. He was, like Johnson, a lounger at the college-gate. He 
gained neither premiums nor a scholarship, and was not admitted 
to the degree of bachelor of arts till two years after the regular 
time. His backwardness, it would appear, was the effect of 
despair more than of wilful negligence. | He had been placed 
under a savage tutor, named Theaker Wilder, who used to insult 
him at public examinations, and to treat his delinquencies with 
a ferocity that broke his spirit. On one occasion poor Oliver 

* [An attack of confluent small-pox, which had nearly deprived him of 
life, and left traces of its ravages in his face ever after, first caused him to 
be taken from mider the care of Byrne. — Prior, vol. i. p. 28.] 

t [Out of nineteen elected on the occasion, his name stands seventeenth on 
the list. The emolument was trifling, being no more than about thirty 
shillings ; but the credit something, for it was the first distinction he had 
obtained in his college career. — Prior, vol. i. p. 87.] 

X [Mr. Prior discovered several notices of Goldsmith in the college 
books. On the 9th of May, 1718, he was turned down; twice he was cau- 
tioned for neglecting a Greek lecture, and thrice commended for diligence in 
attending it.] 



318 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

was so imprudent as to invite a company of young people, of both 
sexes, to a dance and supper in his rooms ; on receiving intelli- 
gence of which, Theaker grimly repaired to the place of revelry, 
belaboured him before his guests, and rudely broke up the 
assembly. The disgrace of this inhuman treatment drove him 
for a time from the university. He set out from Dublin, intend- 
ing to sail from Cork for some other country, he knew not whi- 
ther; but, after wandering about till he was reduced to such 
famine that he thought a handful of gray peas, which a girl gave 
him at a wake, the sweetest repast he had ever tasted, he returned 
home, like the prodigal son, and matters were adjusted for his 
being received again at college. 

About the time of his finally leaving the university his father 
died.* His uncle Contarine, from whom he experienced the 
kindness of a father, wished him to have taken orders, and Oliver 
is said to have applied for them, but to have been rejected, 
though for what reason is not sufficiently known.j He then 
accepted the situation of private tutor in a gentleman's family, 
and retained it long enough to save about SOL, with which he 
bought a tolerable horse, and went forth upon his adventures. 
At the end of six weeks his friends, having heard nothing of him, 
concluded that he had left the kingdom, when he returned to his 
mother's house, without a penny, upon a poor little horse which 
he called Fiddleback, and which was not worth more than twenty 
shillings. The account which he gave of himself was, that he 
had been at Cork, where he had sold his former horse, and paid 
his passage to America ; but the ship happening to sail whilst he 
was reviewing the curiosities of the city, he had just money 
enough left to purchase Fiddleback, and to reach the house of an 
old acquaintance on the road. This nominal friend, however, 
had received him very coldly ; and, in order to evade his appli- 
cation for pecuniary relief, had advised him to sell his diminutive 
steed, and promised him another in his place, which should cost 
him nothing either for price or provender. To confirm this pro- 
mise, he pulled out an oaken staflf from beneath a bed. Just as 
this generous ofifer had been made, a neighbouring gentleman 

* [His father died early in 1747, before he had become an exhibitioner on 
Smith's foundation. On the 27th of February, 1749, after a residence of 
four years, he was admitted to the degree of bachelor of arts.] 

t [The story is told in various ways, and it is hard to get at the truth. 
The rejection is the only certainty, — Forster, p. 32.] 



GOLDSMITH. 



came in, and invited both the miser and Goldsmith to dine with 
him. Upon a short acquaintance, Oliver communicated his situ- 
ation to the stranger, and was enabled, by his liberality, to pro- 
ceed upon his journey. This was his story. His mother, it may 
be supposed, was looking rather gravely upon her prudent child, 
who had such adventures to relate, when he concluded them by 
saying, " and now, my dear mother, having struggled so hard to 
come home to you, I wonder that you are not more rejoiced to 
see me." Mr. Contarine next resolved to send him to the 
Temple ; but on his way to London he was fleeced of all his 
money in gaming, and returned once more to his mother's house 
in disgrace and affliction. Again was his good uncle reconciled 
to him, and equipped him for Edinburgh, that he might pursue 
the study of medicine. 

On his arrival at Edinburgh, in the autumn of 1752, he took 
lodgings, and sallied forth to take a view of the city ; but, at a 
late hour, he recollected that he had omitted to inform himself of 
the name and address of his landlady ; and would not have found 
his way back if he had not fortunately met with the porter who 
had carried his luggage. After attending two winter courses of 
medical lectures at Edinburgh, he was permitted by his uncle to 
repair to Leyden, for the sake of finishing his studies, when his 
departure was accelerated by a debt, which he had contracted by 
becoming security for an acquaintance, and from the arrest 
attending which he was only saved by the interference of a 
friend. If Leyden, however, was his object, he, with the usual 
eccentricity of his motions, set out to reach it by way of Bordeaux, 
and embarked in a ship which was bound thither from Leith, 
but which was driven, by stress of weather, into Newcastle-upon- 
Tyne. His fellow-passengers were some Scotchmen, who had 
been employed in raising men in their own country for the service 
of the King of France. They were arrested, by orders from 
government, at Newcastle ; and Goldsmith, who had been com- 
mitted to prison with them, was not liberated till after a fort- 
night's confinement. By this accident, however, he was eventu- 
ally saved from an early death. This vessel sailed during his 
imprisonment, and was wrecked at the mouth of the Garonne, 
where every soul on board perished. 

On being released he took shipping for Holland, and arrived 
at Leyden, where he continued about a twelvemonth, and studied 



320 LIVES OP THE POETS. 

chemistry and anatomy. At the end of that time, having ex- 
hausted his last farthing at the gaming-table, and expended the 
greater part of a supply which a friend lent him in purchasing 
some costly Dutch flower-roots, which he intended for a present 
to his uncle, he set out to make the tour of Europe on foot, un- 
encumbered at least by the weight of his money. The manner in 
which he occasionally subsisted during his travels, by playing his 
flute among the peasantry, and by disputing at the different uni- 
versities, has been innumerable times repeated. In the last and 
most authentic account of his life,* the circumstance of his hav- 
ing ever been a travelling tutor is called in question. Assistance 
from his uncle must have reached him, as he remained for six 
months at Padua, after having traversed parts of Flanders, 
France, Germany, and Switzerland, in the last of which countries 
he wrote the first sketch of his ' Traveller.' 

His uncle having died while he was in Italy, he was obliged to 
travel on foot through France to England, and arrived [1756] 
in London in extreme distress. He was for a short time usher 
in an academy, and was afterwards found and relieved by his old 
friend Dr. Sleigh, in the situation of journeyman to a chemist.*|' 
By his friend's assistance he was enabled to take lodgings in the 
city, and endeavoured to establish himself in medical practice. 
In this attempt he was unsuccessful ; but, through the interest of 
Dr. Milner, a dissenting clergyman, he obtained the appointment 
of a physician to one of the factories in India ; and, in order to 
defray the expense of getting thither, prepared to publish, by 
subscription, his ' Inquiry into the Present State of Polite 
Literature in Europe.' For some unknown reason his appoint- 
ment to India was dropped 4 and we find him, in April 1757, 

* [Since Mr, Campbell wrote, the Life of Goldsmith has been written 
hy Mr. Prior in two octavo volumes, full of new facts and new matter, that 
attest what unwearied research and well-directed diligence may achieve ; and 
still more recently by Mr. Forster, in ' The Life and Adventures of Oliver 
Goldsmith,' one of the most readable biographies in the English language.] 

t [Named Jacob, and residing at the comer of Monument or Bell-yard, 
on Fish-street-hill. 

X [On the 21st of December, 1758, he presented himself at Surgeons' Hall^ 
London, for examination as an hospital-mate, but was found not qualified. 
Mr. Prior, who discovered this curious fact, supposes that his India physi- 
cianship was too expensive an outfit for his purse, and as a last resource he 
had tried to pass as an hospital-mate. " Honour to that court of examiners, i 
I say, to the end of time ! They found him not qualified to be a surgeon's 
mate, and left him qualified to heal the wounds and abridge the sufferings 
of all the world."— Forster, p. 140.] 



GOLDSMITH. 32I 



writing in Dr. Griffiths' ' Monthly Review,' for a salary, and his 
board and lodging in the proprietor's house. Leaving this 
employment, he went into private lodgings, and finished his 
* Inquiry into the State of Literature,' which was published in 
1759. The rest of his history from this period becomes chiefly 
that of his well-known works. His principal literary employ- 
ments, previous to his raising himself into notice by his poetr}^, 
were — conducting * The Lady's Magazine,' writing a volume of 
essays called * The Bee,' * Letters on English History,' ' Letters 
of a Citizen of the World,' and ' The Vicar of Wakefield.' 
Boswell has related the affecting circumstances in which Dr. 
Johnson found poor Goldsmith in lodgings at Wine-office-court, 
Fleet-street, where he had finished ' The Vicar of Wakefield,' 
immured by bailiffs from without, and threatened with expulsion 
by his landlady from within. The sale of the novel for 60^. 
brought him present relief; and within a few years from that 
time he emerged from his obscurity to the best society and lite- 
rary distinction. But whatever change of public estimation he 
experienced, the man was not to be altered ; and he contiimed to 
exhibit a personal character which was neither much reformed by 
experience, nor dignified by reputation. It is but too well known, 
that, with all his original and refined faculties, he was often the 
butt of witlings, and the dupe of impostors. He threw away his 
money at the gaming-table, and might also be said to be a losing 
gambler in conversation, for he aimed in all societies at being 
brilliant and argumentative ; but generally chose to dispute on 
the subjects which he least understood, and contrived to forfeit 
as much credit for common sense as could be got rid of in collo- 
quial intercourse. After losing his appointment to India, he 
applied to Lord Bute for a salary to be enabled to travel into the 
interior of Asia. The petition was neglected because he was 
then unknown. The same boon, however, or some adequate 
provision, might have been obtained for him afterwards, when he 
was recommended to the Earl of Northumberland, at that time 
Lord-lieutenant of Ireland. But, when he waited on the Earl, 
he threw away his prepared compliments on his lordship's steward, 
and then retrieved the mistake by telling the nobleman, for whom 
he had meditated a courtly speech, that he had no confidence in 
the patronage of the great, but would rather rely upon the 
booksellers. There must have been something, however, with 

Y 



322 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



all his peculiarities, still endearing in his personal character. 
Burke was known to recall his memory with tears of affection in 
his eyes. It cannot be believed that the better genius of his 
writings was always absent from his conversation. One may 
conceive graces of his spirit to have been drawn forth by Burke 
or Eeynolds, which neither Johnson nor Garrick had the sensi- 
bility to appreciate. 

For the last ten years of his life he lived in the Temple. He 
was one of the earliest members of the Literary Club. At the 
institution of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds procured 
for him the honorary appointment of Professor of Ancient His- 
tory. Many tributes, both of envy and respect, were paid to his 
celebrity ; among the latter an address is preserved, which was 
sent to him as a public character by the since celebrated Thomas 
Paine. Paine was at that time an officer of excise, and was the 
principal promoter of an application to parliament for increasing 
the salaries of excisemen. He had written a pamphlet on the 
subject, which he sent to Goldsmith, and solicited an interview 
for the sake of interesting him further in the scheme. In the i 
year 1770 he visited France ; but there is nothing in his 
correspondence to authenticate any interesting particulars of his 
journey. 

The three important eras of his literary life were those of his 
appearance as a novelist, a poet, and a dramatic writer. ' The 
Vicar of Wakefield ' was finished in 1763, but was not printed 
till three years after, when his ' Traveller,' in 1764, had esta- 
blished his fame. The ballad of ' Edwin and Angelina ' came 
out in the following year ; and in 1768 the appearance of his 
* Good-Natured Man ' made a bold and happy change in the 
reigning fashion of comedy, by substituting merriment for insipid 
sentiment. His ' Deserted Village' appeared in 1770; and his 
second comedy, 'She Stoops to Conquer,' in 1773. At intervals 
between those works he wrote his Roman and English Histories, 
besides biographies and introductions to books. These were all 
executed as tasks for the booksellers, but with a grace which no t 
other man could give to task-work. His ' History of the Earth 
and Animated Nature ' was the last and most amusing of these 
prose undertakings. In the mean time he had consumed more 
than the gains of all his labours by imprudent management, and 
had injured his health by occasional excesses of applicatioai 



GOLDSMITH. 323 



His debts amounted to 4000/. '^ Was ever poet," said Dr. John- 
son, " so trusted before ?" To retrieve his finances he contracted 
for new works to the booksellers, engaged to write comedies for 
both the theatres, and projected a ' Universal Dictionary of the 
Sciences.' But his labours were terminated by a death not 
wholly unimputable to the imprudence which had pervaded his 
life. In a fever, induced by strangury and distress of mind, he 
made use of Dr. James's powders, under circumstances which he 
was warned would render them dangerous. The symptoms of his 
disease grew immediately more alarming, and he expired at the 
end of a few days, in his forty-sixth year. 

Goldsmith's poetry enjoys a calm and steady popularity. It 
inspires us, indeed, with no admiration of daring design, or of 
fertile invention ; but it presents, within its narrow limits, a dis- 
tinct and unbroken view of poetical delightfulness. His descrip- 
tions and sentiments have the pure zest of nature. He is refined 
without false delicacy, and correct without insipidity. Perhaps 
there is an intellectual composure in his manner, which may, in 
some passages, be said to approach to the reserved and prosaic ; 
but he unbends from this graver strain of reflection to tenderness, 
and even to playfulness, with an ease and grace almost exclu- 
sively his own ; and connects extensive views of the happiness 
and interests of society with pictures of life that touch the heart 
by their familiarity. His language is certainly simple, though it 
is not cast in a rugged or careless mould. He is no disciple of 
the gaunt and famished school of simplicity. Deliberately as he 
wrote, he cannot be accused of wanting natural and idiomatic 
expression ; but still it is select and refined expression. He uses 
the ornaments which must always distinguish true poetry from 
prose; and when he adopts colloquial plainness, it is with the 
utmost care and skiU to avoid a vulgar humility. There is more 
gf this sustained simplicity, of this chaste economy and choice of 
;words, in Goldsmith than in any modern poet, or, perhaps, than 
Vi'ould be attainable or desirable as a standard for every writer of 
rhyme. In extensive narrative poems such a style would be too 
difficult. There is a noble propriety even in the careless strength 
of great poems, as in the roughness of castle walls; and, gene- 
rally speaking, where there is a long course of story or observa- 
tion of life to be pursued, such exquisite touches as those of 
Goldsmith would be too costly materials for sustaining it. But 

y2 



324 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

let us not imagine that the serene graces of this poet were not 
admirably adapted to his subjects. His poetry is not that of im- 
petuous, but of contemplative sensibility ; of a spirit breathing its 
regrets and recollections in a tone that has no dissonance with 
the calm of philosophical reflection. He raises rather elevated 
speculative views of the causes of good and evil in society ; at 
the same time the objects which are most endeared to his imagina^ 
tion are those of familiar and simple interest ; and the domestic 
affections may be said to be the only genii of his romance. The 
tendency towards abstracted observation in his poetry agi-ees 
peculiarly with the compendious form of expression which he 
studied ;* whilst the homefelt joys, on which his fancy loved to 
repose, required at once the chastest and sweetest colours of lan- 
guage to make them harmonise with the dignity of a philosophical 
poem. His whole manner has a still depth of feeling and reflec- 
tion, which gives back the image of nature unruflfled and mi- 
nutely. He has no redundant thoughts or false transports ; but 
seems, on every occasion, to have weighed the impulse to which 
he surrendered himself. Whatever ardour or casual felicities he 
may have thus sacrificed, he gained a high degree of purity and 
self-possession. His chaste pathos makes him an insinuating 
moralist, and throws a charm of Claude-like softness over his 
descriptions of homely objects that would seem only fit to be the 
subjects of Dutch painting. But his quiet enthusiasm leads the 
aflfections to humble things without a vulgar association ; and he 
inspires us with a fondness to trace the simplest recollections of 
Auburn, till we count the furniture of its alehouse and listen to 
" The varnish'd clock that clicked behind the door." 
He betrays so little effort to make us visionary by the usual 
and palpable fictions of his art ; he keeps apparently so close to 
realities, and draws certain conclusions respecting the radical 
interests of man so boldly and decidedly, that we pay him a 
compliment not always extended to the tuneful tribe — that of| 
judging his sentiments by their strict and logical interpretation.: 
In thus judging him by the test of his philosophical spirit, I a|ni 

* There is, perhaps, no couplet in English rhyme more perspicuously 
condensed than those two lines of ' The Traveller,' in which he describes the 
once flattering, vain, and happy character of the French : — 

" They please, are pleased, they give to get esteem. 
Till, seeming blest, they grow to what they seem." 



GOLDSMITH. 325 



ttWt prepared to say that he is a purely impartial theorist. He 
advances general positions respecting the happiness of society, 
founded on limited views of truth, and under the bias of local 
feelings. He contemplates only one side of the question. It 
must be always thus in poetry. Let the mind be ever so tran- 
quilly disposed to reflection, yet, if it retains poetical sensation, it 
will embrace only those speculative opinions that fall in with the 
tone of the imagination. Yet I am not disposed to consider his 
principles as absurd, or his representations of life as the mere 
reveries of fancy. 

In * The Deserted Village ' he is an advocate for the agricul- 
tural in preference to the commercial prosperity of a nation ; 
and he pleads for the blessings of the simpler state, not with the 
vague predilection for the country which is common to poets, but 
with an earnestness that professes to challenge our soberest belief. 
Between Rousseau's celebrated letter on the influence of the 
sciences, and this popular poem, it will not be difficult to discover 
some resemblance of principles. They arrive at the same con- 
clusions against luxury — the one from contemplating the ruins of 
a village, and the other from reviewing the downfall of empires. 
But the English poet is more moderate in his sentiments than the 
philosopher of Geneva ; he neither stretches them to such obvious 
paradox, nor involves them in so many details of sophistry ; nor 
does he blaspheme all philosophy and knowledge in pronouncing 
a malediction on luxury. Rousseau is the advocate of savage- 
ness. Goldsmith only of simplicity. Still, however, his theory 
is adverse to trade, and wealth, and arts. He delineates their 
evils, and disdains their vaunted benefits. This is certainly not 
philosophical neutrality ; but a neutral balancing of arguments 
would have frozen the spirit of poetry. We must consider him 
as a pleader on that side of the question which accorded with the 
predominant state of his heart ; and, considered in that light, he 
is the poetical advocate of many truths. He revisits a spot con- 
secrated by his earliest and tenderest recollections ; he misses the 
bloomy flush of life which had marked its once busy, but now 
depopulated scenes; he beholds the inroads of monopolising 
wealth, which had driven the peasant to emigration ; and, tracing 
the sources of the evil to " Trade's proud empire,'* which has so 
often proved a transient glory and an enervating good, he laments 
the state of society " where wealth accumulates and men decay." 



326 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

Undoubtedly, counter views of the subject might have presented 
themselves, both to the poet and philosopher. The imagination 
of either might have contemplated, in remote perspective, the 
replenishing of empires beyond the deep, and the diffusion of 
civilised existence, as eventual consolations of futurity for the 
present sufferings of emigration. But those distant and cold cal- 
culations of optimism would have been wholly foreign to the tone 
and subject of the poem. It was meant to fix our patriotic sym- 
pathy on an innocent and suffering class of the community, to 
refresh our recollections of the simple joys, the sacred and strong 
local attachments, and all the manly virtues of rustic life. Of 
such virtues the very remembrance is by degrees obliterated in 
the breasts of a commercial people. It was meant to rebuke the 
luxurious and selfish spirit of opulence, which, imitating the pomp 
and solitude of feudal abodes, without their hospitality and pro- 
tection, surrounded itself with monotonous pleasure-grounds, 
which indignantly " spurned the cottage from the green." 

On the subject of those misnamed improvements, by the way, 

in which • 

" Along the lawn, where scatter'd hamlets rose, 
Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose," 

the possessors themselves of those places have not been always 
destitute of compunctions similar to the sentiments of the poet. 
Mr. Potter, in his ' Observations on the Poor Laws,' has recorded 
an instance of it. " When the late Earl of Leicester was compli- 
mented upon the completion of his great design at Holkham, he 
replied, ' It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's coun- 
try. I look round, not a house is to be seen but mine. I am 
the Giant of Giant Castle, and have eat up all my neighbours.' " 
Although Goldsmith has not examined all the points and bear- 
ings of the question suggested by the changes in society which 
were passing before his eyes, he has strongly and affectingly 
pointed out the immediate evils with which those changes were 
pregnant. Nor, while the picture of Auburn delights the fancy, 
does it make a useless appeal to our moral sentiments. It may 
be well sometimes that society, in the very pride and triumph of 
its improvement, should be taught to pause and look back upon 
its former steps — to count the virtues that have been lost, or the 
victims that have been sacrificed, by its changes. Whatever may 
be the calculations of the political economist as to ultimate effects. 



p. WHITEHEAD. 327 



the circumstance of agricultural wealth being thrown into large 
masses, and of the small farmer exiled from his scanty domain, 
foreboded a baneful influence on the independent character of the 
peasantry, which it is by no means clear that subsequent events 
have proved to be either slight or imaginary. 

Pleasing as Goldsmith is, it is impossible to ascribe variety to 
his poetical character ; and Dr. Johnson has justly remarked 
something of an echoing resemblance of tone and sentiment be- 
tween « The Traveller ' and < The Deserted Village.* But the 
latter is certainly an improvement on its predecessor. The field 
of contemplation in ' The Traveller ' is rather desultory. The 
other poem has an endearing locality, and introduces us to beings 
with whom the imagination contracts an intimate friendship. 
Fiction in poetry is not the reverse of Truth, but her soft and 
enchanted resemblance ; and this ideal beauty of nature has been 
seldom united with so much sober fidelity as in the groups and 
scenery of ^ The Deserted Village.' * 



PAUL WHITEHEAD. 

[Born, 1710. Died, 1774.] 

Paul Whitehead was the son of a tailor in London, and, 
after a slender education, was placed as an apprentice to a wool- 
len-draper. He afterwards went to the Temple, in order to 
study law. Several years of his life (it is not quite clear at what 
period) were spent in the Fleet prison, owing to a debt which he 
foolishly contracted, by putting his name to a joint security for 
3000/. at the request of his friend Fleetwood, the theatrical 
manager, who persuaded him that his signature was a mere 
matter of form. How he obtained his liberation we are not 
informed. 

^ In the year 1735 he married a Miss Anne Dyer, with whom 
he obtained 10,000/. She was homely in her person, and very 
weak in intellect ; but Whitehead, it appears, always treated her 
with respect and tenderness. 

He became, in the same year, a satirical rhymer against the 

* ["Where is the poetry of which one-half is good ? Is it ' The ^neid' ? 
is it Milton's ? is itDryden's ? is it any one's except Pope's and Goldsmith's ? 
of which all is good. — Byron's Works, vol. iv. p. 306.] 



328 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

ministry of Walpole ; and having published his ' State Dunces/ 
a weak echo of the manner of * The Dunciad/ he was patronised 
by the opposition, and particularly by Bubb Dodington. In 
1739 he published ' The Manners,' a satire, in which, Mr. Chal- 
mers says, he attacks everything venerable in the constitu- 
tion. The poem is not worth disputing about ; but it is certainly 
a mere personal lampoon, and no attack on the constitution. 
For this invective he was summoned to appear at the bar of the 
House of Lords, but concealed himself for a time, and the affair 
was dropped. The threat of prosecuting him, it was suspected, 
was meant as a hint to Pope, that those who satirised the great 
might bring themselves into danger; and Pope (it is pretended) 
became more cautious. There would seem, however, to be 
nothing very terrific in the example of a prosecution that must 
have been dropped either from clemency or conscious weakness. 
The ministerial journals took another sort of revenge, by accusing 
him of irreligion ; and the evidence, which they candidly and 
consistently brouglit to substantiate the charge, was the letter of 
a student from Cambridge, who had been himself expelled from 
the university for atheism. 

In 1744 he published another satire, entitled ' The Gymnasiad,' 
on the most renowned boxers of the day. It had at least the 
merit of being harmless. 

By the interest of Lord Despenser he obtained a place under 
government, that of deputy-treasurer of the chamber ; and, re- 
tiring to a handsome cottage which he purchased at Twicken- 
ham, he lived in comfort and hospitality, and suffered his small 
satire and politics to be equally forgotten. Churchill attacked 
him in a couplet : — 

" May I (can worse disgrace on manhood fall ?) 
Be born a Whitehead, and baptized a Paul." 

But though a libertine like Churchill, he seems not to have been 
the worse man of the two. Sir John Hawkins gives him the 
character of being good-hearted, even to simplicity ; and says 
that he was esteemed at Twickenham for his kind offices, and 
for composing quarrels among his neighbours. 



HARTE. 329 



WALTER HARTE. 

[Born about 1707. Died, i774.] 
The father of this writer was a fellow of Pembroke College, 
Oxford, prebendary of Wells, and vicar of St. Mary's at Taun- 
ton, in Somersetshire. When Judge Jefferies came to the 
assizes at Taunton, to execute vengeance on the sharers of Mon- 
mouth's rebellion, Mr. Harte waited upon him in private, and 
remonstrated against his severities. The judge listened to him 
attentively, though he had never seen him before. It was not 
in Jefferies' nature to practise humanity; but, in this solitary 
instance, he showed a respect for its advocate, and in a few 
months advanced the vicar to a prebendal stall in the cathedral 
of Bristol. At the Revolution the aged clergyman resigned his 
preferments, rather than take the oath of allegiance to King 
William ; an action which raises our esteem of his intercession 
with Jefferies, while it adds to the unsalutary examples of men 
supporting tyrants, who have had the virtue to hate their 
tyranny. 

The accounts that are preserved of his son, the poet, are not 
very minute or interesting. The date of his birth has not even 
been settled. A writer in ' The Gentleman's Magazine ' fixes it 
about 1707 ; but, by the date of his degrees at the university, 
this supposition is ^utterly inadmissible ; and, all circumstances 
considered, it is impossible to suppose that he was born later 
than 1700. He was educated at Marlborough College, and took 
his degree of Master of Arts at Oxford in 1720.* He was in- 
troduced to Pope at an early period of his life ; and, in return 
for the abundant adulation which he offered to that poet, vvas 
rewarded with his encouragement, and even his occasional assist- 
ance in versification. Yet, admirer as he was of Pope, his man- 
ner leans more to the imitation of Dry den. In 1727 he published 
by subscription a volume of poems, which he dedicated to the 
Earl of Peterborough, who, as the author acknowledges, was the 
first patron of his Muse. In the preface it is boasted that the 

* [This, according to Mr. Croker's showing (' Boswell,' vol. i. p. 378), is 
not the case. The Walter Harte who took his degree of A.M. at Pembroke 
College, Oxford, in 1720, was not the poet; for he was of St. Mary's Hall, 
and made A.M. on the 21st of January, 1730. This one fact removes Mr. 
Campbell's after difficulties.] 



330 LIVES OP THE POETS. 

poems had been chiefly written under the age of nineteen. As 
he must have been several years turned of twenty when he made 
this boast, it exposes either his sense or veracity to some suspicion. 
He either concealed what improvements he had made in the 
poems, or showed a bad judgment in not having improved them. 

His next publications, in 1730 and 1735, were an ' Essay oa 
Satire,' and another on ' Reason,' to both of which Pope is sup- 
posed to have contributed many lines. Two sermons, which he 
printed, were so popular as to run through five editions. He 
therefore rose, with some degree of clerical reputation, to be Prin- 
cipal of St. Mary Hall, Oxford ; and was so much esteemed, that 
Lord Lyttelton recommended him to the Earl of Chesterfield, as 
the most proper tutor and travelling companion to his son. 
Harte had, indeed, every requisite for the preceptorship of Mr. 
Stanhope that a Graevius or Gronovius could have possessed, 
but none of those for which we should have supposed his father 
to have been most anxious. He was profoundly learned, but 
ignorant of the world, and awkward in his person and address. 
His pupil and he, however, after having travelled together for 
four years, parted with mutual regret ; and Lord Chesterfield 
showed his regard for Harte by procuring for him a canonry of 
Windsor. 

During his connexion with Lord Peterborough, that nobleman 
had frequently recommended to him to write the life of Gustavus 
Adolphus. For this historical work he collected, during his 
travels, much authentic and original information. It employed 
him for many years, and was published in 1759; but either 
from a vicious taste, or from his having studied the idioms of 
foreign languages till he had forgotten those of his own, he 
wrote his history in a style so obscure and uncouth, that its 
merits as a work of research were overlooked, and its reception 
from the public was cold and mortifying. Lord Chesterfield, in 
speaking of its being translated into German, piously wishes 
" that its author had translated it into English, as it was full of 
Germanisms, Latinisms, and all istns but Anglicisms." All the 
time, poor Harte thought he was writing a style less laboured 
and ornate than that of his contemporaries ; and when George 
Hawkins, the bookseller, objected to some of his most violent 
phrases, he used to say, " George, that is what we call writing.** 
This infatuation is the more surprising, that his sermons, already 



HAETE. 331 



mentioned, are marked by no such affectation of manner ; and he 
published in 1764 'Essays on Husbandry/ which are said to be 
remarkable for their elegance and perspicuity. 

Dr. Johnson, according to Boswell, said, " that Harte was 
excessively vain : that he left London on the day his 'Life of 
Gustavus ' was published, to avoid the great praise he was to 
receive ; but Robertson's * History of Scotland ' having come out 
the same day, he was ashamed to return to the scene of his mor- 
tification." This sarcastic anecdote comes in the suspicious 
company of a blunder as to dates, for Robertson's * History of 
Scotland ' was published a month after [before ?] Harte's ' Life 
of Gustavus ;' and it is besides rather an odd proof of a man's 
vanity that he should have run away from expected compli- 
ments.* 

The failure of his historical work is alleged to have mortified 
him so deeply as to have affected his health. All the evidence 
of this, however, is deduced from some expressions in his letters, 
in which he complains of frequent indisposition. His biographers, 
first of all, take it for granted that a man of threescore could not 
possibly be indisposed from any other cause than from reading 
harsh reviews of his ' Life of Gustavus ;' and then, very con- 
sistently, show the folly of his being grieved at the fate of his 
history, by proving that his work was reviewed, on the whole, 
rather in a friendly and laudatory manner. Harte, however, was 
^o far from being a martyr, either to the justice or injustice of 
criticism, that he prepared a second edition of ' The Life of Gus- 
tavus ' for the press ; and announced, in a note, that he had 
finished the ' History of the Thirty Years' War in Germany.' 
His servant Dore, afterwards an innkeeper at Bath, got possession 
of his MSS., and this work is supposed to be irrecoverably lost. 
In the mean time he was struck with a palsy in 1766, which 
attacked him again in 1769, and put a period to his life five 

* [Harte's ' Life of Gustavus Adolphus,' Mr. Chalmers tells us, was " a 
very unfortunate publication, Hume's ' House of Tudor ' came out the same 
■week, and Robertson's ' History of Scotland ' only a month before ; and, after 
perusing these, poor Harte's style could not certainly be endured." Mr. 
Chalmers, perhaps, may require to be told that industry in collecting, ex- 
amining, and arranging the materials of history, and fidelity in using them, 
are the first qualities of an historian ; that in those qualities Harte has not 
been surpassed ; that in the opinion of military men Harte's is the best mili- 
tary history in our language ; and that it is rising and will continue to rise in 
repnte.— Southey, Quar. Rev. vol. xi. p, 497.] 



332 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

years after. At the time of his death he was vicar of St. Austell 
and Blazy in Cornwall. 

His poetry is little read ; and I am aware of hazarding the 
appearance of no great elegance of taste in professing myself 
amused and interested by several parts of it, particularly by his 
' Amaranth.' In spite of pedantry and grotesqueness, he ap- 
pears, in numerous passages, to have condensed the reflection and 
information of no ordinary mind. 



JOHN ARMSTRONG. 

[Born, 1709. Died, 1779.] 

John Armstrong was born in Roxburghshire, in the parish of 
Castleton, of which his father was the clergyman. He com- 
pleted his education, and took a medical degree, at the university 
of Edinburgh, with much reputation, in the year 1732. Amidst 
his scientific pursuits he also cultivated literature and poetry. 
One of his earliest productions in verse was an ' Imitation of the 
Style of Shakspeare,' which received tlie approbation of tlie poecs 
Young and Thomson ; although humbler judges will perhaps be 
at a loss to perceive in it any striking likeness to his great 
original. Two other sketches, also purporting to be imitations 
of Shakspeare, are found among his works. They are the frag- 
ments of an unfinished tragedy. One of them, ' The Dream of 
Progne,' is not unpleasing. In the other he begins the descrip- 
tion of a storm by saying that 

" The sun went down in wrath, the skies foam d brass." 
It is uncertain in what year he came to London; but in 1735 
he published an anonymous pamphlet, severely ridiculing the 
quackery of untaught practitioners. He dedicated this perform- 
ance to Joshua Ward, John Moore, and others, whom he styles 
" the Antacademic philosophers, and the generous despisers of 
the schools." As a physician he never obtained extensive prac- 
tice. This he himself imputed to his contempt of the little arti- 
fices which, he alleges, were necessary to popularity ; by others 
the failure was ascribed to his indolence and literary avocations ; 
and there was probably truth in both accounts. A disgraceful 
poem, entitled ' The (Economy of Love,' which he published 



ARMSTRONG. 333 



after coming to London, might have also had its share in im- 
peding his professional career. He corrected the nefarious 
production at a later period of his life, betraying at once a con- 
sciousness of its impurity and a hankering after its reputation. 
So unflattering were his prospects, after several years' residence 
in the metropolis, that he applied (it would seem without suc- 
cess) to be put on the medical staff of the forces then going out 
to the West Indies. His ' Art of Preserving Health * appeared 
in 1744, and justly fixed his poetical reputation. In 1746 he 
was appointed physician to the hospital for sick soldiers, behind 
Buckingham House. In 1751 he published his poem on ' Bene- 
volence ;' in 1753 his ' Epistle on Taste ;' and in 1758 his prose 
* Sketches by Launcelot Temple.' Certainly none of these pro- 
ductions exalted the literary character which he had raised to 
himself by his * Art of Preserving Health.' The poems * Taste ' 
and ' Benevolence ' are very insipid. His ' Sketches ' have been 
censured more than they seem to deserve for " oaths and excla- 
mations, and for a constant struggle to say smart things." * 
They contain indeed some expressions which might be wished 
away, but these are very few in number ; and several of his 
essays are plain and sensible, without any effort at humour. 

In 1760 he was appointed physician to the forces that went 
over to Germany. It is at this era of his life that we should 
expect its history to be the most amusing, and to have furnished 
the most important relics of observation, from his having visited 
a foreign country which was the scene of war, and where he was 
placed, by his situation, in the midst of interesting events. It 
may be pleasing to follow heroes into retirement ; but we are also 
fond of seeing men of literary genius amidst the action and busi- 
ness of life. Of Dr. Armstrong in Germany, however, we have 
no other information than what is afforded by his epistle to 
Wilkes, entitled ' Day,' which is by no means a bright production, 
jp,nd chiefly devoted to subjects of eating. With Wilkes he was 
■^t that time on terms of friendship, but their cordiality was 
afterwards dissolved by politics. Churchill took a share in the 
quarrel, and denounced our author as a monster of ingratitude 
towards Wilkes, who had been his benefactor ; and Wilkes, by 
subsequently attacking Armstrong in ' The Daily Advertiser,' 
j^Jiowed that he did not disapprove of the satirist's reproaches. 
* Chalmers's ' Biographical Dictionary.' 



334 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

To such personalities Armstrong might have replied in the words 
of Prior, 

" To John I owed great obligation, 
Bat John unhappily thought fit 
To publish it to all the nation ; 

Sure John and I are more than quit." 

But though his temper was none of the mildest, he had the can- 
dour to speak with gratitude of Wilkes's former kindness, and 
acknowledged that he was indebted to him for his appointment 
in the army. 

After the peace he returned to London, where his practice as 
well as acquaintance was confined to a small circle of friends, 
but among whom he was esteemed as a man of genius. From 
the originality of his mind, as well as from his reading and more 
than ordinary taste in the fine arts, his conversation is said to 
have been richly entertaining. Yet if the character which is 
supposed to apply to him in ' The Castle of Indolence ' * describe 
him justly, his colloquial delightfulness must have been inter- 
mittent. In 1770 he published a collection of his Miscellanies, 
containing a new prose piece, * The Universal Almanack,* and 
* The Forced Marriage,' a tragedy which had been offered to 
Garrick, but refused. The whole was ushered in by a preface, 
full of arrogant defiance to public opinion. " He had never 
courted the public," he said ; " and if it was true what he had 
been told, that the best judges were on his side, he desired no 
more in . the article of fame as a writer." There was a good 
deal of matter in this collection that ought to have rendered its 
author more modest. ' The Universal Almanack' is a wretched 
production, to which the objections of his propensity to swearing* 
and abortive efforts at humour apply more justly than to his 
' Sketches ;' and his tragedy, ' The Forced Marriage,' is a mor- 
tuum caput of insipidity. In the following year he visited 
France and Italy, and published a short but splenetic account of 
his tour, under his old assumed name of Launcelot Temple. His 
last production was a volume of ' Professional Essays,' in which 
he took more trouble to abuse quacks than became his dignity, 

* Armstrong's character is said to have been painted in the stanza of ' The 
Castle of Indolence ' beginning 

" With him was sometimes join'd in silent walk 
(Profoundly silent, for they never spoke) 
One shier still, who quite detested talk," &c. 



ARMSTRONG. 335 



and showed himself a man to whom the relish of life was not 
improving as its feast drew towards a close. He died in Sep- ■ 
tember, 1779,* of a hurt which he accidentally received in step- 
ping out of a carriage ; and, to the no small surprise of his 
friends, left behind him more than 3000/., saved out of a very 
moderate income, arising principally from his half-pay. 

His ' Art of Preserving Health * is the most successful attempt 
in our language to incorporate material science with poetry. Its 
subject had the advantage of being generally interesting ; for 
there are few things that we shall be more willing to learn, 
either in prose or verse, than the means of preserving the out- 
ward bulwark of all other blessings. At the same time the dif- 
ficulty of poetically treating a subject which presented disease in 
all its associations is one of the most just and ordinary topics of 
his praise. Of the triumphs of poetry over such difficulty he 
had no doubt high precedents, to show that strong and true de- 
lineations of physical evil are not without an attraction of fearful 
interest and curiosity to the human mind ; and that the enjoy- 
ment which the fancy derives from conceptions of the bloom and 
beauty of healthful nature may be heightened by contrasting them 
with the opposite pictures of her mortality and decay. Milton 
had turned disease itself into a subject of sublimity, in the vision 
of Adam, with that intensity of the fire of genius which converts 
whatever materials it meets with into its aliment ; and Armstrong, 
though his powers were not Miltonic, had the courage to attempt 
what would have repelled a more timid taste. His Muse might 
be said to show a professional intrepidity in choosing the subject ; 
and, like the physician who braves contagion (if allowed to pro- 
long the simile), we may add that she escaped, on the whole, 
with little injury from the trial. By the title of the poem the 
author judiciously gave his theme a moral as well as a medical 
interest. He makes the influence of the passions an entire part 
of it. By professing to describe only how health is to be pre- 
served, and not how it is to be restored, he avoids the unmanage- 
able horrors of clinical detail ; and, though he paints the disease, 
wisely spares us its pharmaceutical treatment. His course 
through the poem is sustained with lucid management and pro- 
priety. What is explained of the animal economy is obscured 

* [He died without a will, and was buried in the church of St. Paul, 
Covent-garden.] 



336 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

by no pedantic jargon, but made distinct, and, to a certain degree, 
picturesque to the conception. We need not indeed be reminded 
how small a portion of science can be communicated in poetry ; 
but the practical maxims of science, which the Muse has stamped 
with imagery and attuned to harmony, have so far an advantage 
over those which are delivered in prose, that they become more 
agreeable and permanent acquisitions of the memory. If the 
didactic path of his poetry is, from its nature, rather level, he 
rises above it, on several occasions, with a considerable strength 
of poetical feeling. Thus, in recommending the vicinity of 
woods around a dwelling, that may shelter us from the winds 
whilst it enables us to hear their music, he introduces the follow- 
ing pleasing lines : — 

" Oh ! when the growling winds contend, and all 

The sounding forest fluctuates in the storm. 

To sink in warm repose, and hear the din 

Howl o'er the steady battlements, delights 

Above the luxury of vulgar sleep." 

In treating of diet he seems to have felt the full difficulty of 
an humble subject, and to have sought to relieve his precepts 
and physiological descriptions with all the wealth of allusion 
and imagery which his fancy could introduce. The appearance 
of a forced effort is not wholly avoided, even where he aims at 
superior strains, in order to garnish the meaner topics, as when 
he solemnly addresses the Naiads of all the rivers in the world 
in rehearsing the praises of a cup of water. But he closes the 
book in a strain of genuine dignity. After contemplating the 
effects of Time on the human body, his view of its influence 
dilates, with easy and majestic extension, to the universal struc- 
ture of nature ; and he rises from great to greater objects with a 
climax of sublmiity : — 

" What does not fade ? the tower that long had stood 

The crush of thunder and the Avarring -winds, 

Shook by the slow, but sure destroyer, Time, 

Now haugs in doubtful ruins o'er its base. 

And flinty pyramids, and walls of brass, 

Descend : the Babylonian spires are sunk ; 

Achaia, Rome, and Egypt moulder down. 

Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones. 

And tottering empires rush by their own weight. 

This huge rotundity we tread grows old ; 

And all those worlds that roll around the sun, 

The sun himself, shall die." 

He may, in some points, be compared advantageously with tlie 



LANGHORNE. 337 



best blank-verse writers of the age ; and he will be found free 
from their most striking defects. He has not the ambition of 
Akenside nor the verbosity of Thomson. On the other hand, 
shall we say that he is equal in genius to either of those poets ? 
Certainly, his originality is nothing like Thomson's; and the 
rapture of his heroic sentiments is unequal to that of the author 
of ' The Pleasures of Imagination.' For, in spite of the too fre- 
quently false pomp of Akenside, we still feel that he has a de- 
voted moral impulse, not to be mistaken for the cant of morality — • 
a zeal in the worship of Virtue, which places her image in a high 
and hallowed light. Neither has his versification the nervous 
harmony of Akenside's, for his habit of pausing almost uniformly 
at the close of the line gives an air of formality to his numbers. 
His vein has less mixture than Thomson's ; but its ore is not so 
fine. Sometimes we find him trying his strength with that 
author in the same walk of description, where, though correct 
and concise, he falls beneath the poet of ' The Seasons ' in rich 
and graphic observation. He also contributed to * The Castle 
of Indolence ' some stanzas, describing the diseases arising from 
sloth, which form rather an useful background to the luxuriant 
picture of the Castle than a prominent part of its enchantment. 

On the whole he is likely to be remembered as a poet of 
judicious thoughts and correct expression ; and, as far as the 
rarely successful application of verse to subjects of science can 
be admired, an additional merit must be ascribed to the hand 
which has reared poetical flowers on the dry and difl&cult ground 
of philosophy. 



JOHN LANGHORNE. 

[Born, 1735. Died, 1779.] 

John Langhorne was the son of a beneficed clergyman in 
Lincolnshire. He was born at Kirkby Steven, in Westmore- 
land. His father dying when he was only four years old, the 
charge of giving him his earliest instruction devolved upon his 
mother, and she fulfilled the task with so much tenderness and 
care as to leave an indelible impression of gratitude upon his 
memory. He recorded the virtues of this parent on her tomb, 
as well as in an affectionate monody. Having finished his 



338 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

classical education at the school of Appleby, in his eighteentlr 
year, he engaged himself as private tutor in a family near 
Rippon. His next employment was that of assistant to the free- 
school of Wakefield. While in that situation he took deacon's 
orders; and, though he was still very young, gave indications of 
popular attraction as a preacher. He soon afterwards went as 
preceptor into the family of Mr. Cracroft, of Hackthorn, where 
he remained for a couple of years, and during that time entered 
his name at Clare Hall, Cambridge, though he never resided a^^ 
his college, and consequently never obtained any degree. He 
had at Hackthorn a numerous charge of pupils, and, as he has 
not been accused of neglecting them, his time must have been 
pretty well occupied in tuition ; but he found leisure enough to 
write and publish a great many pieces of verse, and to devote so 
much of his attention to a fair daughter of the family, Miss 
Anne Cracroft, as to obtain the young lady's partiality, and 
ultimately her hand. He had given her some instructions in the 
Italian, and, probably trusting that she was sufficiently a convert 
to the sentiment of that language, which pronounces that " all 
time is lost which is not spent in love," he proposed immediate 
marriage to her. She had the prudence, however, though 
secretly attached to him, to give him a firm refusal for tlie 
present ; and our poet, struck with despondency at the dis- 
appointment, felt it necessary to quit the scene, and accepted of 
a curacy in the parish of Dagenham. The cares of love, it 
appeared, had no bad effect on liis diligence as an author. He 
allayed his despair by an apposite ode to ' Hope ;' and continued 
to pour out numerous productions in verse and prose, with that 
florid facility which always distinguished his pen. Among these, 
his ' Letters of Theodosius and Constantia' made him, perhaps, 
best known as a prose-writer. His ' Letters on Religious Retire- 
ment ' were dedicated to Bishop Warburton, who returned him a 
most encouraging letter on his just sentiments in matters of re- 
ligion ; and, wiiat M'as coming nearer to the author's purpose, 
took an interest in his worldly concerns. He was much less for- 
tunate in addressing a poem, entitled ' The Viceroy,' to the Earl 
of Halifax, who was then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. This 
heartless piece of adulation was written with the view of obtain- 
ing his Lordship's patronage ; but the viceroy was either too 
busy or too insensible to praise to take any notice of Langhorne. 



LANGHORNE. 330 



In his poetry of this period we find his * Visions of Fancy,' his 
first part of ' The Enlargement of the Mind,' and his pastoral 
^ Valour and Genius,' written in answer to Churchill's ' Prophecy 
of Famine.' In consequence of the gratitude of the Scotch for 
this last poem, he was presented with the diploma of doctor in 
divinity by the University of Edinburgh. His profession and 
religious writings gave an appearance of propriety to this com- 
pliment, which otherwise would not have been discoverable from 
any striking connexion of ideas between a doctorship of divinity 
and an eclogue on ' Valour and Genius.' 

He came to reside permanently in London in 1764, having 
obtained the curacy and lectureship of St. John's, Clerkenwell. 
Being soon afterwards called to be assistant-preacher at Lin- 
coln's-inn Chapel, he had there to preach before an audience 
which comprehended a much greater number of learned and in- 
telligent persons than are collected in ordinary congregations ; 
and his pulpit oratory was put to what is commonly reckoned a 
severe test. It proved to be also an honourable test. He con- 
tinued in London for many years, with the reputation of a 
popular preacher and a ready writer. His productions in prose, 
besides those already named, were his ' Sermons,' ' Effusions of 
Fancy and Friendship,' ' Frederick and Pharamond, or the 'Con- 
solations of Human Life,' ' Letters between St. Evremond and 
Waller,' a translation of Plutarch's ' Lives,' written in con- 
junction with his brother, which might be reckoned a real service 
to the bulk of the reading community,* 'Memoirs of Collins,' 
and a translation of Denina's ' Dissertation on the Ancient 
Republics of Italy.' He also wrote for several years in * The 
Monthly Review.' An attempt which he made in tragedy, 
entitled ' The Fatal Prophecy,' proved completely unsuccessful ; 
and he so far acquiesced in the public decision as never to print 
It more than once. In an humbler walk of poetry he composed 
"^The Country Justice' and 'The Fables of Flora.' The 
'^Fables ' are very garish. ' The Country Justice ' was written 
from observations on the miseries of the poor, which came home 
to his own heart ; and it has at least the merit of drawing our 
Attention to the substantial interests of humanity. f 

° '* The translation of Plutarch has been since corrected and improved by 
Mr. Wrangham. 

•)• [Perhaps on some inhospitable shore 
The houseless wretch a widow'd parent bore ; 

z2 



340 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

In 1767, after a courtship of several years, he obtained Miss 
Cracroft in marriage, having corresponded with her from the 
time he had left her father's house ; and her family procured for 
him the living of Blagden, in Somersetshire ; but his domestic 
happiness with her was of short continuance, as she died of her 
first child — the son who lived to publish Dr. Langhorne's works. 
In 1772 he married another lady, of the name of Thomson, the 
daughter of a country gentleman, near Brough, in Westmore- 
land ; and shortly after their marriage he made a tour with his 
bride through some part of France and Flanders. At the end of 
a few years he had the misfortune to lose her, by the same fatal 
cause which had deprived him of his former partner. Otherwise 
his prosperity increased. In 1777 he was promoted to a prebend 
in the cathedral of Wells ; and in the same year was enabled to 
extend his practical usefulness and humanity by being put in the 
commission of tlie peace in his own parish of Blagden. From 
his insight into the abuses of parochial office he was led at this 
time to compose the poem of ' The Country Justice,' already 
mentioned. The tale of * Owen of Carron ' was the last of his 

Who then, no more by golden prospects led, 
Of the poor Indian begg'd a leafy bed. 
Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
Perhaps that parent naourn'd her soldier slain ; 
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, 
The big drops, mingling with the milk he drew. 
Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery, baptized in tears." 

Langhorne, The Country Justice. 
This passage, beautiful in itself, has an associated interest beyond its 
beauty. " The only thing I remember," says Sir Walter Scott, " which was 
remarkable in Burns' manner, was the effect produced upon him by a print 
of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow; his dog sitting 
in misery on one side ; on the other his widow, with a child in her arms. 
These lines were written beneath : — 

' Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain,' &c. 
Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather the ideas which it sug- 
gested to his mind. He actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines 
were, and it chanced that nobody but myself remembered that tliey occur 
in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's, called by the unpromising title of 
' The Justice of Peace.' I whispered my information to a friend present, 
who mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, which, 
though of mere civility, I then received, and still recollect, with very great 
pleasure." — Lockhart's Life of Burns. 8vo. ed., p. 151, 

Burns, it is said, foretold the future fame of Scott : " That boy will be 
heard of yet :" — 

" 'Tis certainly mysterious that the name 
Of prophets and of poets is the same."] 



PENROSE. 341 



works. It will not be much to the advantage of this story to 
compare it with the simple and affecting ballad of * Gill Morrice,' 
from which it was drawn. Yet, having read ' Owen of Carron ' 
with delight when I was a boy, I am still so far a slave to early 
associations as to retain some predilection for it. 

The particular cause of Dr. Langhorne's death, at the age of 
forty-four, is not mentioned by his biographers, further than by 
a surmise that it was accelerated by intemperance. From the 
general decency of his character, it may be presumed that his^ 
indulgences were neither gross nor notorious, though habits 
short of such excess might undermine his constitution. 

It is but a cheerless task of criticism to pass with a cold look 
and irreverent step over the literary memories of men who, 
though they may rank low in the roll of absolute genius, have 
yet possessed refinement, information, and powers of amusement, 
above the level of their species, and such as would interest and 
attach us in private life. Of this description was Langhorne ; 
an elegant scholar and an amiable man. He gave delight to 
thousands from the press and the pulpit; and had sufficient 
attraction, in his day, to sustain his spirit and credit as a writer, 
in the face of even Churchill's envenomed satire. Yet, as a prose 
writer, it is impossible to deny that his rapidity was the effect of 
lightness more than vigour ; and, as a poet, there is no ascribing 
to him either fervour or simplicity. His Muse is elegantly lan- 
guid. She is a fine lady, whose complexion is rather indebted to 
art than to the healthful bloom of nature. It would be unfair 
not to except from this observation several plain and manly sen- 
timents which are expressed in his poem ' On the Enlargement 
of the Mind,' and some passages in his ^ Country Justice,' which 
are written with genuine feeling. 



THOMAS PENROSE. 

[Born, 1743. Died, 1779.] 

The history of Penrose displays a dash of warlike adventure, 
which has seldom enlivened the biography of our poets. He 
was not led to the profession of arms, like Gascoigne, by his 
poverty, or like Quarles, Davenant, and Waller, by political cir- 
cumstances ; but, in a mere fit of juvenile ardour, gave up his 



342 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

studies at Oxford, where he was preparing to become a clergy* 
man, and left the banners of the church for those of the battle. 
This was in the summer of 1762, when the unfortunate expe- 
dition against Buenos Ayres sailed under the command of Cap- 
tain Macnamara. It consisted of three ships : — the Lord Clive, 
of 64 guns ; the Ambuscade, of 40, on board of which Penrose 
acted as lieutenant of marines ; the Gloria, of 38 — and some 
inferior vessels. Preparatory to an attack on Buenos Ayres, it 
was deemed necessary to begin with the capture of Nova Colonia, 
and the ships approached closely to the fortress of that settlement. 
The men were in high spirits ; military music sounded on board ; 
while the new uniforms and polished arms of the marines gave a 
splendid appearance to the scene, Penrose, the night before, 
had w ritten and despatched to his mistress in England a poetical 
address, wliich evinced at once the affection and serenity of his 
heart on the eve of danger. The gay preparative was followed 
by a heavy fire of several hours, at the end of which, when the 
Spanish batteries were almost silenced, and our countrymen in 
immediate expectation of seeing the enemy strike his colours, the 
Lord Clive was found to be on fire ; and the same moment 
which discovered the flames sliowed the impossibility of extin- 
guishing them. A dreadful spectacle was then exhibited. Men 
who had. the instant before, assured themselves of wealth and 
conquest, were seen crowding to the -sides of the ship, with the 
dreadful alternative of perishing by fire or water. The enemy's 
fire was redoubled at the sight of their calamity. Out of Mac- 
namara's crew of 340 men, only 78 were saved. Penrose escaped 
with his life on board the Ambuscade, but received a wound in 
the action ; and the subsequent hardships w^iich he underwent, 
in a prize-sloop in which he was stationed, ruined the strength 
of his constitution. He returned to England, resumed his 
studies at Oxford, and, having taken orders, accepted of the 
curacy of Newbury, in Berkshire, of which his father was the 
rector. He resided there for nine years, having married the lady 
already alluded to, whose name was Mary Slocock. A friend at 
last rescued him from this obscure situation, by presenting him 
with the rectory of Beckington and Standerwick, in Somerset- 
shire, worth about 500/. a-year. But he came to his preferment 
too late to enjoy it. His health, having never recovered from 
the shock of his American service, obliged him, as a last remedy, 



BROOKE. 343 



to try the hot wells at Bristol, at which place he expired in his 

thirty-sixth year. 

♦ 

HENRY BROOKE. 

[Bom, 1706. Died, 1783.] 

Henry Brooke was born in the county of Cavan, in Ireland, 
where his father was a clergyman. He studied at Trinity Col- 
lege, Dublin, and was a pupil of Dr. Sheridan ; but he was taken 
from the university at the age of seventeen, and sent to England 
to study the law at the Temple. On his coming to London he 
brought letters of introduction (probably from Dr. Sheridan) to 
Pope and Swift, both of whom noticed him as a youth of promis- 
ing talents. At the end of a few years he returned to Dublin, 
and endeavoured to practise as a chamber counsel ; but, without 
having obtained much business, involved himself in the cares of 
a family by marrying a beautiful cousin of his own, who had 
been consigned to bis guardianship. It is related, not much to 
his credit, that he espoused her in her thirteenth year. The 
union, however, proved to be as happy as mutual affection could 
make it. Having paid another visit to London, he renewed his 
acquaintance with Pope ; and, with his encouragement, published 
his poem entitled ' Universal Beauty.' This poem forms a curi- 
ous but unacknowledged prototype of Darwin's ' Botanic Garden.' 
It has a resemblance to that work in manner, in scientific spirit, 
and in volant geographical allusion, too striking to be supposed 
accidental ; although Darwin has gone beyond his original in 
prominent and ostentatious imagery. 

After publishing his poem he returned to Ireland, and applied 
to his profession ; but his heart was not in it, and he came once 
more to England to try his fortune as a man of letters. In that 
character he was cordially received by the Prince of Wales and 
his friends, as an accession to their phalanx ; and this patronage 
was the more flattering to Brooke, as the maintenance of patriotic 
principles was the declared bond of union at the Prince's court. 
He had begun to translate the ' Jerusalem ' of Tasso, and had pro- 
ceeded as^far as the fourth book ; but it is said that he was invited 
to quit this task, that he might write a tragedy in the cause of 
Freedom, which should inspirit the people of England. Glover, 
it was pretended, was the epic champion of Liberty, who had 



344 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

pointed her spear at Walpole ; and Brooke was now to turn the 
arm of Tragedy against him, by describing a tyrannic minister, in 
his play of ' Gustavus Vasa/ With regard to Glover, this was 
certainly untrue. His poetry breathed the spirit of liberty, but 
he was above the wretched taste of making a venerable antique 
subject the cliannel of grotesque allusion to modern parties or 
living characters. If Brooke's Trollio was really meant for 
Walpole, the minister's friends need not have been much alarmed 
at the genius of a tragic poet who could descend to double 
meanings. They might have felt secure, one would think, that 
the artifice of poets could not raise any dangerous zeal in Eng- 
lishmen against their malt or excise bills, by the most cunning 
hints about Thermopylae or Dalecarlia. But, as if they had been 
in collusion with Brooke to identify Walpole with Trollio, they 
interdicted the representation of the play. The author therefore 
published it, and got, it is said, 800/. by the sale. 

He lived for some time very comfortably on this acquisition, at 
Twickenham, in the neighbourhood of Pope, till the state of his 
health obliged him to seek the benefit of his native air ; when, to 
the surprise of those who knew him, he determined to remain in 
Ireland. This resolution was owing to the influence of his wife, 
who apprehended that his political zeal among his English friends 
might lead him to some intemperate publication. Brooke, how- 
ever, had too much of the politician to lose it by returning to his 
native soil. In the year of the rebellion he addressed his ' Farmer's 
Letters' to his countrymen, and they were supposed to have had 
a beneficial influence on their temper at a critical period. He 
was also, to his honour, one of the earliest advocates for alleviat- 
ing the penal laws against the Catholics. Their pacific behaviour 
in 1745 had certainly furnished him with a powerful argument 
in their behalf. 

He wrote thirteen dramatic pieces, of which ' Gustavus Yasa' 
and ' The Earl of Essex ' were the only two that ever reached the 
English stage. The rest were not heard of in England till his 
collected works were published in 1778 ; but his novel, ' The 
Fool of Quality,' gave some popularity to his name. In Ireland 
Lord Chesterfield gave him the appointment of a barrack-master, 
which he held till his death. The accounts of his private cir- 
cumstances, in that kingdom, are given rather confusedly by his 
biographers; but it appears, upon the whole, that they were 



SCOTT. 345 



unfortunate. He supported an only brother in his house, with a 
family as numerous as his own, and ruined himself by his gene- 
rosity. At last, the loss of his wife, after a union of fifty years, 
the death of many of his children, and his other misfortunes, over- 
whelmed his intellects. Of this imbecility there were, indeed, 
some manifestations in the latest productions of his pen. 



JOHN SCOTT. 

[Born, 1730. Died, 1783.] 

This worthy and poetical Quaker was the son of a draper in 
London, and was born in the borough of Southwark. His father 
retired to Amwell, in Hertfordshire, when our poet was only ten 
years old ; and this removal, together with the circumstance of 
his never having been inoculated for the small-pox, proved an 
unfortunate impediment to his education. He was put to a day- 
school in the neighbouring town of Ware, where not much 
instruction was to be had ; and from that little he was called 
away upon the first alarm of infection. Such, indeed, was his 
constant apprehension of the disease, that he lived for twenty 
years within twenty miles of London, without visiting it more 
tlian once. About the age of seventeen, however, he betook him- 
self to .reading. His family, from their cast of opinions and 
society, were not likely to abound either in books or conversation 
relating to literature ; but he happened to form an acquaintance 
and friendship with a neighbour of the name of Frogley, a master 
bricklayer, who, though an uneducated man, \vas an admirer of 
poetry, and by his intercourse with this friend he strengthened his 
literary propensity. His first poetical essays were transmitted to 
* The Gentleman's Magazine.' In his thirtieth year he published 
four elegies, which were favourably received. His poems entitled 
' The Garden ' and ' Amwell,' and his volume of collected poetical 
pieces, appeared after considerable intervals ; and his ' Critical 
Essays on the English Poets ' two years after his death. These, 
with his ' Remarks on the Poems of Eowley,' are all that can be 
called his literary productions. He published also two political 
tracts, in answer to Dr. Johnson's ' Patriot' and * False Alarm.' 
His critical essays contain some judicious remarks on Denliam 
and Dyer; but his verbal strictures on Collins and Goldsmith 



346 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

discover a miserable insensibility to the soul of those poets. His 
own verses are chiefly interesting where they breathe the pacific 
principles of the Quaker ; while his personal character engages 
respect, from exhibiting a public spirit and liberal taste beyond 
the habits of his brethren. He was well informed in the laws of 
his country ; and, though prevented by his tenets from becoming 
a magistrate, he made himself useful to the inhabitants of Am well 
by his offices of arbitration, and by promoting schemes of local 
improvement. He was constant in his attendance at turnpike 
meetings, navigation trusts, and commissions of land-tax. Ware 
and Hertford were indebted to him for the plan of opening a 
spacious road between those two towns. His treatises on the 
highway and parochial laws were the result of long and laudable 
attention to those subjects. 

His verses, and his amiable character, gained him by degrees 
a large circle of literary acquaintance, which included Dr. John- 
son, Sir William Jones, Mrs. Montague, and many other distin- 
guished individuals ; and having submitted to inoculation in his 
thirty-sixth year, he was from that period more frequently in 
London. In his retirement he was fond of gardening ; and, in 
amusing himself with the improvement of his grounds, had 
excavated a grotto in the side of a hill, which his biographer, 
Mr. Hoole, writing in 1785, says, was still shown as a curiosity 
in that part of the country. He was twice married. His first 
wife was the daughter of his friend Frogley. He died at a house 
in Eadcliff", of a putrid fever, and was interred there in the bury- 
ing ground of the Friends. 

GEORGE ALEXANDER STE\TENS. 

[Born, 17—. Died, 1784.] 

If Fletcher of Saltoun's maxim be true, " that the popular songs 
of a country are of more importance than its laws," Stevens must 
be regarded as an important criminal in literature. But the 
songs of a country rather record than influence the state of 
popular morality. Stevens celebrated hard drinking, because it 
was the fashion ; and his songs are now seldom vociferated, be- 
cause that fashion is gone by. George was a leading member of 
all the great bacchanalian clubs of his day — the Choice Spirits, 
Comus' Court, and others of similar importance and utility. 



STEVENS— W. WHITEHEAD. 347 

Before the scheme of his lecture brought him a fortune, he had 
frequently to do penance in jail for the debts of the tavern ; and, 
on one of those occasions, wrote a poem entitled ' Religion,' ex- 
pressing a penitence for his past life ; which was probably sincere 
while his confinement lasted. He was also author of ' Tom Fool,' 
a novel ; ' The Birthday of Folly,' a satire ; and several dramatic 
pieces of slender consequence. 



WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. 

[Born, 1715. Died, 1785.] 
William Whitehead was born in Cambridge. " It would be 
vain," says his biographer, Mason, the poet, " to conceal that he 
was of low extraction ; because the secret has been more than 
once divulged by those who gain what they think an honest live- 
lihood by publishing the lives of the living ; and it would be 
injurious to his memory, because his having risen much above 
the level of his origin bespeaks an intrinsic merit, which mere 
ancestry can never confer. Let it then be rather boasted than 
whispered that he was the son of a baker." This is really 
making too much of a small thing. Every day certainly wit- 
nesses more wonderful events than the son of a tradesman rising 
to the honours of a poet laureate and the post of a travelling 
tutor. Why Mason should speak of the secret of his extraction 
being divulged is difficult to conceive, unless we suppose that 
Whitehead was weak enough to have wished to conceal it ; a sus- 
picion, however, which it is not fair to indulge, when we look to 
the general respectability of his personal character, and to the 
honest pride which he evinced in voluntarily discharging his 
father's debts. But, with all respect for Whitehead, be it observed 
that the annals of " baking'' can boast of much more illustrious 
individuals having sprung from the loins of its professors. 
.. His father, however, was a man of taste and expenditure 
4nuc}i above tlie pitch of a baker. He spent most of his time in 
ornamenting a piece of ground, near Grantchester, which still 
goes by the name of Whitehead's Folly ; and he left debts behind 
him at his death that would have done honour to the prodigality 
of a poet. In consequence of his father dying in such circum- 
stances, young Whitehead's education was accomplished with 
great difficulty, by the strictest economy on his own part, and 



348 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

the assistance of his mother, whose discharge of duty to him he 
has gratefully recorded. At the age of fourteen he was put to 
Winchester School, upon the foundation. He was there distin- 
guished by his love of reading, and by his facility in the pro- 
duction of English verse ; and before he was sixteen he had 
written an entire comedy. When the Earl of Peterborough, 
accompanied by Pope, visited Winchester School, in the year 
1 733, he gave ten guineas to be distributed in prizes among the 
boys. Pope prescribed the subject, which was " Peterborough," 
and young Whitehead was one of the six who shared the prize- 
money. It would appear that Pope had distinguished him on 
this occasion, as the reputation of his notice was afterwards of 
advantage to Whitehead when he went to the university. He 
also gained some applause at AYinchester for his powers of acting, 
in the part of Marcia, in ' Cato.' He was a graceful reciter, 
and is said to have been very handsome in his youth. Even his 
likeness, which is given in Mason's edition of his works, though 
it was taken when he was advanced in years, has an elegant and 
prepossessing countenance. It was observed that his school 
friendships were usually contracted with youths superior to him- 
self in station. Without knowing his individual associates, it is 
impossible to say whether vanity, worldly prudence, or a taste 
for refined manners, predominated in this choice ; but it is ob- 
servable that he made his way to prosperity by such friendships, 
and he seems to have early felt that he had the power of acquiring 
them. At Winchester he was school-tutor to Mr. AYallop, after- 
wards Lord Lymington, son to the Earl of Portsmouth. 

At the election to New College in 1735 he was treated with 
some injustice, being placed too low in the roll of candidates ; 
and was obliged to leave Winchester without obtaining from 
thence a presentation to either university. He, however, obtained 
a scholarship at Clare Hall, Cambridge, from the very circum- 
stance of that low extraction for which Mason apologises. Being 
the orphan son of a baker in Cambridge, he was thought the 
best entitled to be put on the foundation of Pyke, who liad been 
of that trade and town. His scholarsliip was worth only four 
shillings a- week, and he was admitted as a sizer ; but the infe- 
riority of his station did not prevent his introduction to the best 
society; and, before he left the university, he made himself 
known by several publications, particularly by his ' Essay on the 



WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. 349 

Danger of writing Verse.' Having obtained a fellowship and a 
master's degree, he was on the point of taking orders, when his 
intention was prevented, in consequence of his being invited by 
the Earl of Jersey to be the domestic tutor of his son. Viscount 
Villiers. This situation was made peculiarly agreeable to him 
by the kindness of the Jersey family, and by the abundant leisure 
which it afforded him to pursue his studies, as well as to enjoy 
public amusements. From frequenting the theatre, he was led 
to attempt dramatic composition. His first effort was a little 
farce on the subject of the Pretender, which has never been 
published. In 1750 he brought upon the stage a regular tragedy, 
' The Roman Father,' an imitation of Corneille's ' Horace.' Mason 
has employed a good deal of criticism on this drama to prove 
something analogous to the connoisseur's remark in Goldsmith, 
" that the piece would have been better if the artist had bestowed 
more pains upon it." It is acknowledged, at the same time, by 
his biographer, that ' The Koman Father ' was long enough in its 
author's hands to receive many alterations ; but these had not 
been for the better. It was put through the mangle of Garrick's 
criticism ; and he, according to Mason, was a lover of no beauties 
in a play but those which gave an opportunity for the display 
of his own powers of representing sudden and strong effects of 
passion. This remark of Mason accords with Johnson's com- 
plaint of Garrick's projected innovations in his own tragedy : 
" ThatTellow," he said, " wants me to make Mahomet mad, that 
he may have an opportunity of tossing his hands and kicking his 
heels." For the faults of the piece, however, it is but circuitous 
and conjectural justice to make Garrick responsible ; and, among 
those faults, the mode of the heroine's death is not the slightest. 
After Corneille's heroine has been stabbed by her brother, she 
appears no more upon the stage. The piece, to be sure, drags 
heavily after this event ; for, in fact, its interest is concluded. 
Whitehead endeavours to conquer this difficulty by keeping her 
alive, after she has been wounded, in order to have a conference 
with her father, which she terminates by tearing the bandages off 
her wounds,- and then expires. But the effect of her death by 
this process is more disagreeable than even the tedium of Cor- 
neille's fifth act. It inspires us with a sore physical shuddering, 
instead of tragic commiseration.* 
* The directions for tearing off the bandages are given in Mason's edition 



350 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

In 1754 he brought out at Drury Lane his tragedy of ^ Creusa,' 
a play which, though seldom read and never acted, is by no means 
destitute of dramatic feeling and conception. The subject is 
taken from the ' Ion ' of Euripides ; but with bold, and sometimes 
interesting, alterations. In the Greek story, Creusa, Princess of 
Athens, who had been violated by Apollo, had concealed her 
shame by exposing her infant. She had afterwards married 
Xuthus, a military stranger, who at her father's death succeeded, 
in her right, to the throne of Athens. But their marriage-bed 
having proved fruitless, they arrive at Delphi, to consult the 
oracle for an heir. The oracle pronounces that the first whom 
Xuthus shall meet in going out of the temple is his son. He 
meets with Ion, a youth of unknown parentage, who had been 
reared as a servant in the holy place, and who, in fact, is the 
child of Creusa, whom she had exposed. Xuthus embraces Ion 
for his son ; and, comparing his age with the date of a love 
adventure, which he recollected in former times, concludes that 
Ion is the offspring of that amour. It is no sooner known that 
Xuthus has found a son of his own blood, than the tutor of Creusa 
exhorts the queen to resent this indignity on her childless state, 
and to rid herself of a stepson who may embitter and endanger 
her future days. The tutor attempts to poison Ion, but fails ; 
Creusa is pursued to the altar by her own son, who is with diffi- 
culty prevented from putting her to death. But a discovery of 
their consanguinity takes place ; Minerva descends from heaven 
to confirm the proofs of it ; and having predicted that Ion shall 
reign in Athens, and prudently admonished the mother and son 
to let King Xuthus remain in the old belief of his being father 
to Ion, leaves the piece to conclude triumphantly. Such is the 
bare outline of the ancient drama. Whitehead's storj' is entirely 
tragical, and stripped of miraculous agency. He gives a human 
father (Nicander) to (Ilyssus) the secret child of Creusa. This 
Nicander, the first lover of the lady, had, on the discovery of 
their attachment, been driven into banishment by Creusa's father, 
but had carried with him their new-born offspring ; and both he 
and the infant were supposed to have been murdered in their 
flight from Athens. Nicander, however, had made his way to 

of Whitehead's Works, I observe that in later editions of the play they are 
omitted ; but still, with this improved attention to humanity, the heroine 
protracts her dying scene too long. 



WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. 351 

Delphi, had intrusted his child ^to the temple, and, living in 
the neighbourhood, passed (under the name of Aletes) for the 
tutor of the mysterious orphan. Having obtained a high cha- 
racter for sagacity, he was consulted by the priestess Pythia 
herself ; and he is represented as having an influence upon her 
responses (it is an English poet, we must recollect, and not a 
Greek one, who is telling the story). Meanwhile, Creusa, having 
been forced to give her hand, without her heart, to Xuthus, is 
still a mourner, like Lady Randolph,* when, at the end of 
eighteen years from the birth of Ilyssus, she comes to consult the 
oracle. Struck, at the first sight of Ilyssus, by his likeness to 
Nicander, she conceives an instinctive fondness for the youth. 
The oracle declares him heir to the throne of Athens ; but this is 
accompanied with a rumour of bitter intelligence to Creusa, that 
he is really the son of Xuthus. Her Athenians are indignant at 
the suspicion of Xuthus's collusion with the oracle to entail the 
sceptre of their kingdom on his foreign offspring. Her confidant 
(like the tutor in Euripides) rouses her pride as a queen, and her 
jealousy as a mother, against this intruder. He tries every 
artifice to turn her heart against Ilyssus ; still she retains a par- 
tiality for him, and resists the proposal of attempting his life. 
At length, however, her husband insults her with expressing his 
triumph in his new-found heir, and reproaches her with the 
plebeian grave of the first object of her affection. In the first 
transport of her wrath she meets the Athenian enemy of Ion, 
and a guilty assent is wrung from her that Ilyssus shall be 
poisoned at the banquet. Aletes, ignorant of the plot, had 
hitherto dreaded to disclose himself to Creusa, lest her agitation 
should prematurely interfere with his project of placing his son 
on the throne of Athens. He meets her, however, at last, and 
she swoons at recognising him to be Nicander. When he tells 
her that Ilyssus is her son, she has in turn to unfold the dreadful 
confession of having consented to his death. She flies to the 
banquet, if possible, to avert his fate ; and arrives in time to 
snatch the poisoned chalice from his hand. But though she is 
thus rescued from remorse, she is not extricated from despair. 
To Nicander she has to say, " Am I not Xuthus' wife ? and what 

* If any recollection of Home's tragedy should occur to the reader of 
Whitehead's, it is but fair to remind him that the play of ' Creusa ' was 
produced a year or two earlier than that of ' Douglas.' 



332 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

art thou?" She anticipates that the kingdom of Athens must be 
involved in bloodshed for her sake : one victim she deems would 
suffice, and determines that it shall be herself. Having therefore 
exacted an oath from Xuthus and the Athenians that Ilyssus shall 
succeed to the throne of her fathers, she drinks of the fatal goblet. 

The piece contains some strong situations ; its language is un- 
affected ; and it fixes the attention (if I may judge from my own 
experience) from the first to the last scene. The pure and holy 
character of the young Ilyssus is brought out, I have no hesitation 
to say, more interestingly than in Euripides, by the display of his 
reverential gratitude to the queen upon the first tenderness which 
she shows him, and by the agony of his ingenuous spirit on be- 
holding it withdrawn. And, though Creusa's character is not 
unspotted, she draws our sympathy to some of the deepest con- 
ceivable agonies of human nature. I by no means wish to deny 
that the tragedy has many defects, or to speak of it as a great 
production ; but it does not deserve to be consigned to oblivion. 

The exhibition of Creusa was hardly over when Whitehead 
was called upon to attend his pupil and Viscount Nuneham, son 
to Earl Harcourt, upon their travels. The two young noblemen 
were nearly of an age, and had been intimate from their child- 
hood. They were both so much attached to Whitehead as to 
congratulate each other on his being appointed their common 
tutor. They continued abroad for about two years, during which 
they visited France, Italy, and Germany. In his absence Lady 
Jersey made interest enough to obtain for him the offices of 
secretary and registrar of the order of the Bath. On his return 
to England he was pressed by Lord Jersey to remain with the 
family ; and he continued to reside with them for fourteen years, 
except during his visits to the seat of Lord Harcourt. His 
pupils, who had now sunk the idea of their governor in the 
more agreeable one of their friend, showed him through life un- 
remitted marks of affiection. 

Upon the death of Gibber, in 1757, he succeeded to the place 
of poet laureate. The appointment had been offered to Gray as 
a sinecure, but it was not so when it was given to Whitehead. 
Mason wonders why this was the case, when George 11. had no 
taste for poetry. His wonder is quite misplaced. If the king 
had had a taste for poetry, he would have abolished the laureate 
odes ; as he had not, they were continued. Our author's official 



WILLIAM WHITEHEAD. 353 

lyrics are said by Mason to contain no fulsome panegyric, a feet 
for which I hope his word may be taken ; for to ascertain it by 
perusing the strains themselves would be an alarming under- 
takinsr. But the laurel was to Whitehead no verv enviable dis- 
tinction. He had something more to pay for it than 
" His quit^ent ode, his peppercorn of praise" * 
At first he was assailed by the hostility of all the petty tribe, 
amonsr whom it is lamentable, as Grav remarks, to find beinsps 
capable of envying even a poet laureate. He stood their attacks 
for some time without a sensible diminution of character ; and 
his comedy of ' The School for Lovers,' which was brought out 
in 1762, before it was the fashion to despise him, was pretty well 
received, as an easy and chaste imitation of the manners of well- 
bred life. But in the same year the rabid satire of Churchill 
sorely smote his reputation. Poor Whitehead made no reply. 
Those who, with Mason, consider his silence as the effect of a 
pacific disposition, and not of imbecility, will esteem him the 
more for his forbearance, and will apply to it the maxim, Rarum 
est eloqtienter loq^d varias eloquenter tacere. Among his un- 
published MSS. there were even found verses expressing a com- 
pliment to Churchiirs talents. There is something no doubt 
very amiable in a good and candid man taking the trouble to 
cement rhymes upon the genius of a blackguard who had abused 
him ; but the effect of all this candour upon his own generation 
reminds us how much more important it is, for a man's own 
advantage, that he should be formidable than harmless. His 
candour could not prevent his poetical character from being com- 
pletely killed by Churchill. Justly, some will say ; he was too 
stupid to resist his adversary. I have a different opinion, both 
as to the justice of his fate and the cause of his abstaininsr from 
retaliation. He certainly wrote too many insipid things ; but a 
tolerable selection might be made from his works that would dis- 
cover hb talents to be no legitimate object of contempt ; and 
there is not a trait of arrogance or vanity in any one of his com- 
positions that deserved to be publicly humiliated. He was not a 
satirist ; but he wanted rather the gall than the ingenuity that is 
requisite for the character. If his heart had been full of spleen, 
he was not so wholly destitute of humour as not to have been 
able to deal some hard blows at Churchill, whose private cha- 
• [Co^irper, TMe Talk.-] 

2 A 



354 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

racter was a broad mark, and even whose writings had many- 
vapid parts that were easily assailable. Had Whitehead done so, 
the world would probably have liked him the better for his pug- 
nacity. As it was, his name sank into such a byword of con- 
tempt that Garrick would not admit his ' Trip to Scotland ' on 
the stage unless its author was concealed. He also found it 
convenient to publish his pleasing tale, entitled ' Variety,' anony- 
mously. The public applauded both his farce and his poem, 
because it was not known that they were Whitehead's. 

In 1769 he obtained an unwilling permission from Lord Jersey 
to remove to private lodgings, though he was still a daily ex- 
pected guest at his lordship's table in town ; and he divided his 
summers between the country residences of the Jersey and Har- 
court families. His health began to decline about his seventieth 
year, and in 1785 he was carried off by a complaint in his chest. 
His death was sudden, and his peaceable life was closed without 
a groan. 

RICHARD GLOVER. 

[Born, 1712. Died, 1785.] 
!^ICHARD Glover was the son of a Hamburgh merchant in- 
London, and was born in St. Martin's-lane, Cannon-street. He 
was educated at the school of Cheam, in Surrey ; but, being in- 
tended for trade, was never sent to the university. This circum- 
stance did not prevent him from applying assiduously to classical 
learning ; and he was, in the competent opinion of Dr. Warton, 
one of the best Greek scholars of his time. This fact is worth 
mentioning, as it exhibits how far a determined mind may con- 
nect the pursuits, and even distinctions of literature, with an 
active employment. His first poetical effort was a poem to the 
memory of Sir Isaac Newton, which was written at the age of 
sixteen ; and which his friend. Dr. Pemberton, thought fit to 
prefix to 'A View of the Newtonian Philosophy,' which he pub- 
lished. Dr. Pemberton, who was a man of more science than 
tajste, on this and on some other occasions addressed the public 
with critical eulogies on the genius of Glover, written with an 
excess of admiration which could be pardoned only for its sin- 
cerity. It gives us a higher idea of the youthful promises of his 
mind to find that the intelligent poet Green had the same prepos-. 
session in his favour. Green says of him in the ' Spleen,' 



GLOVER.' 355 



" But there 's a youth, that you can name, 
Who needs no leading-strings to fame ; 
Whose quick maturity of brain 
The birth of Pallas may explain." 

At the age of twenty-five he publislied nine books of his 
' Leonidas.' The poem was immediately taken up with ardour by 
Lord Cobham, to whom it was inscribed, and by all the readers 
of verse and leaders of politics who professed the strongest 
attachment to liberty. It ran rapidly through three editions, and 
was publicly extolled by the pen of Fielding and by the lips of 
Chatham. Even Swift, in one of his letters from Ireland, drily 
inquires of Pope, " Who is this Mr. Glover, who writ ' Leonidas^ 
which is reprinting here, and hath great vogue f * Overrated 
as ' Leonidas ' might be, Glover stands acquitted of all attempts 
or artifice to promote its popularity by false means. He betrayed 
no irritation in the disputes which were raised about its merit ; 
and his personal character appears as respectable in the ebb as in 
the flow of his poetical reputation. 

In the year 1739 he published his poem ' London, or the Pro- 
gress of Commerce,' in which, instead of selecting some of those 
interesting views of the progress of social life and civilization 
which the subject might have afforded, he confined himself to 
exciting the national spirit against the Spaniards. This purpose 
was better effected by his nearly contemporary ballad of ' Hosier's 
Ghost.' 

His talents and politics introduced him to the notice and 
jfavour of Frederick Prince of Wales, whilst he maintained an 
'intimate friendship with the chiefs of the opposition. In the 
mean time he pursued the business of a merchant in the city, and 
was an able auxiliary to his party, by his eloquence at public 
cjineetings, and by his influence with the mercantile body. Such 
was the confidence in his knowledge and talents, that in 1743 the 
merchants of London deputed him to plead, in behalf of their 
neglected rights, at the bar of the House of Commons, a duty 
which he fulfilled with great ability. In 1744 he was offered 
an employment of a very different kind, being left a bequest of 
^00/. by the Duchess of Marlborough, on condition of his 

* [Pope's answer does not appear. " It would have been curious," says 
Pr. Warton, " to have known his opinion concerning a poem that is written 
in a taste and manner so different from his own, in a style formed on the 
Grecian school, and with the simplicity of the ancient."] 

2a2 



356 LIVES OP THE POETS. 

writing the Duke's Life, in' conjunction with Mallet. He re- 
nounced this legacy, while Mallet accepted it, but never fulfilled 
the terms. Glover's rejection of the offer was the more honour- 
able, as it came at a time when his own affairs were so embar- 
rassed as to oblige him to retire from business for several years, 
and to lead a life of the strictest economy. During his distresses 
he is said to have received from the Prince of Wales a present 
of 500/. In the year 1751 his friends in the city made an 
attempt to obtain for him the office of city chamberlain ; but he 
was unfortunately not named as a candidate till the majority of 
votes had been engaged to Sir Thomas Harrison. The speech 
which he made to the livery on this occasion did him much 
honour, both for the liberality with which he spoke of his suc- 
cessful opponent, and for the manly but unassuming manner in 
which he expressed the consciousness of his own integrity amidst 
his private misfortunes, and asserted the merit of his public con- 
duct as a citizen. The name of Guildhall is certainly not apt to 
inspire us with high ideas either of oratory or of personal sym- 
pathy ; yet there is something in the history of this transaction 
which increases our respect, not only for Glover, but for the 
scene itself, in which his eloquence is said to have warmly 
touched his audience with a feeling of his worth as an individual, 
of his spirit as a politician, and of his powers as an accomplished 
speaker. He carried the sentiments and endowments of a 
polished scholar into the most popular meetings of trading life, 
and showed that they could be welcomed there. Such men 
elevate the character of a mercantile country. 

During his retirement from business he finished his tragedy 
of ' Boadicea,* which was brought out at Drury-lane in 1753, 
and was acted for nine nights, it is said, " successfully," perhaps a 
misprint for successively. ' Boadicea ' is certainly not a con- 
temptible drama : it has some scenes of tender interest between 
Venusia and Dumnorix ; but the defectiveness of its incidents, 
and the frenzied character of the British queen, render it, upon 
the whole, unpleasing. Beaumont and Fletcher, in their play- 
on the same subject, have left Boadicea, with all her rashness 
and revengeful disposition, still a heroine ; but Glover makes 
her a beldam and a fury, whom we could scarcely condemn the 
Romans for having carted. The disgusting novelty of this im- 
pression is at variance with the traditionary regard for her name, 



GLOVER. r 357 



from which the mind is unwilling to part. It is told of an emi- 
nent portrait-painter that the picture of each individual which 
he took had some resemblance to the last sitter: when he painted 
a comic actress, she resembled a doctor of divinity, because his 
imagination had not yet been delivered of the doctor. The con- 
verse of this seems to have happened to Glover. He anticipated 
the hideous traits of Medea when he produced the British queen. 
With a singular degree of poetical injustice, he leans to the 
side of compassion in delineating Medea, a monster of infanti- 
cide, and prepossesses us against a high-spirited woman, who 
avenged the wrongs of her country and the violation of her 
daughters. His tragedy of * Medea' appeared in 1761, and the 
spirited acting of Mrs. Yates gave it considerable effect. 

In his later years his circumstances were greatly improved, 
though we are not informed from what causes. He returned 
again to public life ; was elected to parliament ; and there 
distinguished himself, whenever mercantile prosperity was con- 
cerned, by his knowledge of commerce and his attention to its 
interests. In 1770 he enlarged his 'Leonidas' from nine to 
twelve books, and afterwards wrote its sequel, ' The Athenaid,' 
and a sequel to * Medea.' The latter was never acted, and the 
former seldom read. The close of his life was spent in retire- 
ment from business, but amidst the intimacy of the most emi- 
nent scholars of his time. 

Some contemporary writers, calling themselves critics, pre- 
ferred * Leonidas ' in its day to ' Paradise Lost,' because it had 
smoother versification and fewer hard words of learning. The 
reaction of popular opinion, against a work that has been once 
overrated, is apt to depress it beneath its just estimation. It 
is due to ' Leonidas ' to say, that its narrative, descriptions, and 
imagery, have a general and chaste congruity with the Grecism 
of its subject. It is far, indeed, from being a vivid or arresting 
picture of antiquity ; but it has an air of classical taste and pro- 
priety in its design ; and it sometimes places the religion and 
liaanners of Greece in a pleasing and impressive light. The 
poet's description of Dithyrambus making his way from the cave 
of CEta, by a secret ascent, to the temple of the Muses, and 
bursting unexpectedly into the hallowed presence of their 
priestess Melissa, is a passage fraught wdth a considerable de- 
gree of the fanciful and beautiful in superstition. The abode 



358 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

of Oileus is also traced with a suavity of local description which 
is not unusual to Glover; and the speech of Melissa, when she 
first receives the tidings of her venerable father's death, sup- 
ports a fine consistency with the august and poetical character 
which is ascribed to her : — 

*« A sigh 
Broke from her heart, these accents from her lips : 
The full of days and honours through the gate 
Of painless slumber is retired. His tomb 
Shall stand among his fathers, in the shade 
Of his own trophies. Placid were his days, 
Which flow'd through blessings. As a river pure, 
Whose sides are flow'ry, and whose meadows fair. 
Meets in his course a subterranean void, 
There dips his silver head, again to rise. 
And, rising, glide through flowers and meadows new; 
So shall Oileus in those happier fields. 
Where never gloom of trouble shades the mind." 

The undeniable fault of the entire poem is, that it wants im- 
petuosity of progress, and that its characters are without warm 
and interesting individuality. What a great genius might have 
made of the subject, it may be difficult to pronounce by sup- 
position ; for it is the very character of genius to produce effects 
which cannot be calculated. But, imposing as the names of 
Leonidas and Thermopylae may appear, the subject which they 
formed for an epic poem was such, that we cannot wonder at 
its baffling the powers of Glover. A poet, with such a theme, 
was furnished indeed with a grand outline of actions and senti- 
ments; but how difficult was it, after all. that books could teach 
him, to give the close and veracious appearance of life to cha- 
racters and manners beheld so remotely on the verge of the 
horizon of history ! What difficulty to avoid coldness and 
generality on the one hand, if he delineated his human beings 
only with the manners which history could authenticate ; and 
to shun grotesqueness and inconsistency on the other, if he filled 
up the vague outline of the antique with the particular and 
familiar traits of modern life ! Neither Fenelon, with all his 
genius, nor Barthelemy, with all his learning, have kept entirely 
free of this latter fault of incongruity in modernising the 
aspect of ancient manners. The characters of Barthelemy, in 
particular, often remind us of statues in modern clothes. Glover 
has not fallen into this impurity ; but his purity is cold : his 
heroes are like outlines of Grecian faces, with no distinct or 



THOMPSON-HEADLEY. 359 

minute physiognomy. They are not so much poetical characters 
as historical recollections. There are, indeed, some touches of 
spirit in Artemisia's character, and of pathos in the episode of 
Teribazus ; but Leonidas is too good a Spartan, and Xerxes too 
bad a Persian, to be pitied ; and most of the subordinate agents 
that fall or triumph in battle only load our memories with 
their names. The local descriptions of ' Leonidas,' however, 
its pure sentiments, and the classical images which it recalls, 
render it interesting, as the monument of an accomplished and 
amiable mind.* 



EDWARD THOMPSON. 

[Born, 1738. Died, 1786.] 

Captain Edward Thompson was a native of Hull, and went 
to sea so early in life as to be precluded from the advantages of 
a liberal education. 

A few of his sea sonsrs are entitled to remembrance. 



HENRY HEADLEY. 

[Born, 1766. Died, 1788.] 

Henry Headlet, whose uncommon talents were lost to the 
world at the age of twenty-two, was born at Irstead, in Norfolk. 
He received his education at ^the grammar-school of Norwich, 
under Dr. Parr ; and, at the age of sixteen, was admitted a mem- 
ber of Trinity College, Oxford. There the example of Thomas 
Warton, the senior of his college, led him to explore the beauties 
of our elder poets. About the age of twenty he published some 
pieces of verse, which exhibit no very remarkable promise ; but 
his 'Select Beauties of the Ancient English Poets,' which 
appeared in the following year, were accompanied with critical 

* [Glover's ' Leonidas,' though only party spirit could have extolled it as 
a work of genius, obtained no inconsiderable sale, and a reputation which 
flourished for half a century. It has now a place in the two great general 
collections, and deserves to hold it. The author has the merit of having 
departed from bad models, rejected all false ornaments and tricks of style, 
and trusted to the dignity of his subject. And though the poem is cold and 
bald, stately rather than strong in its best parts, and in general rather stiff 
than stately, there is in its very nakedness a sort of Spartan severity that 
commands respect" — Southey, Life of Cowper, vol. ii. p. 176.] 



LIVES OF THE POETS. 



observations that showed an unparalleled ripeness of mind for his 
years. On leaving the university, after a residence of four years, 
he married, and retired to Matlock, in Derbyshire. His matri- 
monial choice is said to have been hastily formed, amidst the 
anguish of disappointment in a previous attachment. But, short 
as his life was, he survived the lady whom he married. 

The symptoms of consumption having appeared in his con- 
stitution, he was advised to try the benefit of a warmer climate ; 
and he took the resolution of repairing to Lisbon, unattended by 
a single friend. On landing at Lisbon, far from feelino; any 
relief from the climate, he found himself oppressed by its sultri- 
ness ; and in this forlorn state was on the point of expiring, 
when Mr. De Vismes, to whom he had received a letter of 
introduction from the late Mr. Windham, conveyed him to his 
healthful villa near Cintra, allotted spacious apartments for his 
use, procured for him the ablest medical assistance, and treated 
him with every kindness and amusement that could console his 
sickly existence. But his malady proved incurable ; and, re- 
turning to England at the end of a few months, he expired at 
Norwich. 



JOHN LOGAN. 

[Born, 1748. Died, 1788.] 

John Logan was the son of a farmer, in the parish ofFala, and 
county of Mid-Lotliian, Scotland. He was educated for the 
church, at the University of Edinburgh. There he contracted 
an intimacy with Dr. Robertson, who was then a student of his 
own standing ; and he was indebted to that eminent character 
for many friendly offices in the course of his life. After finish- 
ing his theological studies, he lived for some time in the family 
of Mr. Sinclair, of Ulbster, as tutor to the late Sir John Sin- 
clair. In his twenty-fifth year he was ordained one of the 
ministers of Leith, and had a principal share in the scheme for 
revising the psalmody of the Scottish church, under the authority 
of the General Assembly. He contributed to this undertaking 
several scriptural translations and paraphrases of his own com- 
position. About the same time he delivered, during two 
successive seasons, in Edinburgh, lectures on history, which 
were attended with so much approbation, that he was brought 



LOGAN. 361 



forward as a candidate for the professorship of history in the 
university ; but, as the chair had been always filled by one of the 
members of the faculty of advocates, the choice fell upon another 
competitor, who possessed that qualification. When disappointed 
in this object, he published the substance of his lectures in a 
work entitled * Elements of the Philosophy of History,' and 
in a separate essay ' On the Manners of Asia.' 

His poems, which had hitherto been only circulated in MS. or 
printed in a desultory manner, were collected and published in 
1781. The favourable reception which they met with en- 
couraged him to attempt the composition of a tragedy, and he 
chose the charter of Runnymede for his subject. This innocent 
drama was sent to the manager of Covent Garden, by whom it 
was accepted, and even put into rehearsal ; but, on some ground- 
less rumour of its containing dangerous political matter, the 
Lord Chamberlain thought fit to prohibit its representation. It 
was, however, acted on the Edinburgh boards, and afterwards 
published, though without exhibiting in its contents anything 
calculated to agitate either poetical or political feelings. 

In the mean time our author unhappily drew on himself the 
displeasure of his parishioners. His connexion with the stage 
was deemed improper in a clergyman. His literary pursuits 
interfered with his pastoral diligence ; and, what was worse, he 
was constitutionally subject to fits of depression, from which he 
took refuge in inebriety. Whatever his irregularities were (for 
they have been diflferently described), he was obliged to com- 
pound for them by resigning his flock and retiring upon a small 
annuity. He came to London, where his principal literary em- 
ployments were, furnishing articles for ' The English Review,' and 
writing in vindication of Warren Hastings. He died at the age 
of forty, at his lodgings in Marlborough-street. His Sermons, 
which were published two years after his death, have obtained 
considerable popularity. 

His ' Ode to the Cuckoo ' is the most agreeable eflfusion of his 
fancy. Burke was so much pleased with it, that, when he came 
to Edinburgh, he made himself acquainted with its author. His 
claim to this piece has indeed been disputed by the relatives of 
Michael Bruce ; and it is certain that, when Bruce's poems were 
sent to Logan, he published them intermixed with his own, without 
any marks to discriminate the respective authors. He is further 



362 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

accused of having refused to restore the MSS. But as the 
charge of stealing the ' Cuckoo ' from Bruce was not brought 
ao^ainst Logan in his lifetime, it cannot, in charity, stand against 
his memory on the bare assertion of his accusers.* 



ROBERT NUGENT, EARL NUGENT. 

[Bora, 1709. Died, 1788.] 

Robert Nugent was descended from the Nugents of Carlans- 
town, in the county of Westmeath, and was a younger son of 
Michael Nugent, by the daughter of Robert Lord Trimlestown. 
His political character was neither independent nor eminent, 
except for such honours as the court could bestow ; but we are 
told that in some instances he stood forth as an advocate for the 
interests of Ireland. His zeal for the manufactures of his native 
isjand induced him, on one occasion, to present the Queen with 
a New-year's gift of Irish grogram, accompanied with a copy of 
verses ; and it was wickedly alleged, that her Majesty had re- 
turned her thanks to the noble author for both his pieces of 



A volume of his poems was published, anonymously, by 
Dodsley, in 1739. Lord Orford remarks, that " he was one of 
those men of parts whose dawn was the brightest moment of a 
long life." He was first known by a very spirited ode on his 
conversion from Popery ; yet he relapsed to the failh which he 
had abjured. On the circumstance of his re-conversion it is 
uncharitable to lay much stress against his memor5\ There have 
been instances of it in men whom either church would have been 
proud to appropriate. But it cannot be denied that his poem 
on Faith formed, at a late period of his life, an anticlimax to 
the first promise of his literary talents ; and though he possessed 
abilities, and turned them to his private account, he rose to no 
public confidence as a statesman.! 

* [Because some pieces "svhich are printed among the remains of poor 
Michael Bruce have been ascribed to Logan, Mr. Chalmers has not thought 
it proper to admit Bruce's poems into his collection. — Southey, Quar. Rev., 
vol. xi. p. 501,] 

t [Goldsmith, who admitted his ' Epistle to a Lady ' among his * Beauties 
of British Poetry," addressed his ' Haunch of Venison ' to him. 

" Mr. Nugent sure did not M-rite his oavti Ode."— Gray to Walpole. This 



EARL NUGENT— MICKLE, 363 

WILLIAM JULIUS MICKLE. 

[Born, 173-t. Died, 1788.] 

William Julius Mickle was born at Langholm, in Dumfries- 
shire. His father, who was a clergyman of the Scottish church, 
had lived for some time in London, and had preached in the dis- 
senting meeting-house of the celebrated Dr. Watts. He returned 
to Scotland, on being presented to the living of Langholm, the 
duties of which he fulfilled for many years ; and, in consideration 
of his long services, was permitted to retain the stipend after he 
had removed to Edinburgh for the better education of his chil- 
dren. His brother-in-law was a brewer in Edinburgh, on whose 
death the old clergyman unfortunately embarked his property, in 
order to continue his business, under the name of his eldest son. 
William, who was a younger son, was taken from the high-school 
at Edinburgh, and placed as a clerk in the concern ; and, on 
coming of age, took the whole respoflsibility of it upon himself. 
When it is mentioned that Mickle had, from his boyish years, 
been an enthusiastic reader of Spenser, and that, before he was 
twenty, he had composed two tragedies and half an epic poem, 
which were in due time consigned to the flames, it may be easily 
conceived that his habits of mind were not peculiarly fitted for 
close and minute attention to a trade which required incessant 
superintendence. He was, besides, unfortunate in becoming 
security for an insolvent acquaintance. In the year 1 763 he 
became a bankrupt ; and, being apprehensive of the severity of 
one of his creditors, he repaired to London, feeling the misery 
of his own circumstances aggravated by those of the relations 
whom he had left behind him. 

Before leaving Scotland he had corresponded with Lord Lyt- 
telton, to whom he had submitted some of his poems in MS., 

was the * Ode to William Pulteney, Esq.' Mallet, it was universally be- 
lieved, had trimmed and doctored it up. 

" What though the good, the brave, the wise. 
With adverse force undaunted rise, 

To break the eternal doom ! 
Though Cato lived, though Tully spoke, 
Though Brutus dealt the godlike stroke, 
Yet perish' d fated Rome." 
This very fine verse is quoted by Gibbon in his character of Brutus — an 
honour it deserves.] 



364 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

and one, entitled ' Providence/ which he had printed in 1762. 
Lord Lyttelton patronized his Muse rather than his fortune. 
He undertook (to use his lordship's own phrase) to be his 
" schoolmaster in poetry ;" but his fastidious blottings could be 
of no service to any man who had a particle of genius ; and the 
only personal benefit which he attempted to render him was to 
write to his brother, the Governor of Jamaica, in Mickle's 
behalf, when our poet had thoughts of going out to that island. 
Mickle, however, always spoke with becoming liberality of this 
connexion. He was pleased with the suavity of Lord Lyttelton's 
manners, and knew that his means of patronage were ver}^ slen- 
der. In the mean time, he lived nearly two years in London, 
upon remittances from his friends in Scotland, and by writing 
for the daily papers. 

After having fluctuated between several schemes for subsist- 
ence, he at length accepted of the situation of corrector to the 
Clarendon Press at Oxford. Whilst he retained that office he 
published a poem, which he at first named ' The Concubine ;* 
but on finding that the title alarmed delicate ears, and suggested 
a false idea of its spirit and contents, he changed it to ' Syr 
Martyn.'* At Oxford he also engaged in polemical divinity, 
and published some severe animadversions on Dr. Harwood's 
recent translation of the New Testament. He also showed his 
fidelity to the cause of religion in a tract entitled ' Voltaire in 
the Shades ; or Dialogues on the Deistical Controversy.' 

His greatest poetical undertaking was the translation of ' The 
Lusiad,' which he began in 1770, and finished in five years. 
For the sake of leisure and retirement, he gave up his situation 
at the Clarendon Press, and resided at the house of a Mr. Tom- 
kins, a farmer, at Forest Hill, near Oxford. The English ' Lu- 
siad' was dedicated, by permission, to the Duke of Buccleucli ; 
but his Grace returned not the slightest notice or kindness to 
his ingenious countryman. Whatever might be the Duke's rea- 
sons, good or bad, for this neglect, he was a man fully capable 
of acting on his own judgment ; and there was no necessity for 
making any other person responsible for his conduct. But 

* [Mickle's facility of versification was so great, that, being a printer by 
profession, he frequently put his lines into type without taking the trouble 
previously to put them into writing ; thus uniting the composition of the 
author with the mechanical operation which typographers call by the same 
name.— Sir Walter Scott, Poet. Works, vol. i. p. 70.] 



MICKLE. 865 



Mickle, or his friends, suspected that Adam Smith and David 
Hume had maliciously stood between him and the Buccleuch 
patronage. This was a mere suspicion, which our author and 
his friends ought either to have proved or suppressed. Mickle 
was indeed the declared antagonist of Hume ; he had written 
ag-ainst him, and could not hear his name mentioned with tern- 
per : but there is not the slightest evidence that the hatred was 
mutual. That Adam Smith should have done him a mean 
injury no one will believe probable who is acquainted with the 
traditional private character of that philosopher. But Mickle 
was also the antagonist of Smith's doctrines on political economy, 
as may be seen in his ' Dissertation on the Charter of the East 
India Company.' The author of ' The Wealth of Nations,' for- 
sooth, was jealous of his opinions on monopolies ! Even this 
paltry supposition is contradicted by dates, for Mickle's tract 
upon the subject of monopolies was published several years after 
the preface to * The Lusiad.' Upon the whole, the suspicion of 
his philosophical enemies having poisoned the ear of the Duke 
of Buccleuch seems to have proceeded from the same irritable 
vanity which made him threaten to celebrate Garrick as the 
hero of a second * Dunciad ' when he refused to accept of his 
tragedy * The Siege of Marseilles.' 

Though ' The Lusiad ' had a tolerable sale, his circumstances 
still made his friends solicitous that he should obtain some settled 
provision. Dr. Lowth offered to provide for him in the church. 
He refused the offer with honourable delicacy, lest his former 
writings in favour of religion should be attributed to the prospect 
of reward. At length the friendship of his kinsman, Commodore 
Johnstone, relieved him from unsettled prospects. Being ap- 
pointed to the command of a squadron destined for the coast of 
Portugal, he took out the translator of Camoens as his private 
secretary. Mickle was received with distinguished honours at 
Lisbon. The Duke of Braganza, in admitting him a member of 
the Royal Academy of Lisbon, presented him with his own 
picture. 

He returned to England in 1780, with a considerable acqui- 
sition of prize-money, and was appointed an agent for the distri- 
bution of the prize profits of the cruise. His fortune now ena- 
bled him to discharge the debts of his early and mercantile life. 
He married the daughter of Mr. Tomkins, with whom he had 



366 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

resided while translating ' The J^usiad ;' and, with ever}' prospect 
of spending the remainder of his life in affluence and tranquillity, 
purchased a house and settled at TVheatley, near Oxford. So 
far his circumstances have almost the agreeable air of a con- 
cluding novel; but the failure of a banker with whom he was 
connected as prize-agent, and a Chancery suit in which he was 
involved, greatly diminished his finances, and disturbed the peace 
of his latter years. He died at Forest Hill, after a short 
illness. 

His reputation principally rests upon the translation of • The 
Lusiad,' which no Englishman had attempted before him, ex- 
cept Sir Richard Fanshawe. Sir Richard's version is quaint, 
flat, and harsh ; and he has interwoven many ridiculously con- 
ceited expressions which are foreign both to the spirit and stvle 
of his original ; but in general it is closer than the modern 
translation to the literal meaning of Camoens. Altogether, 
Fanshawe's representation of the Portuguese poem may be com- 
pared to the wrong side of the tapestry. Mickle, on the other 
hand, is free, flowery, and periphrastical ; he is incomparably 
more spirited than Fanshawe; but still he departs Jfrom the 
majestic simplicity of Camoens' diction as widely as Pope 
has done from that of Homer.* The sonorous and simple lan- 
guage of the Lusitanian epic is like the sound of a trumpet ; 
and Mickle's imitation like the shakes and flourishes of the 
flute. 

* A happy example of this occurs in the description of De Gama's fleet 
anchoring by moonlight in the harbour of Mozambique : — 
" The moon, full orb'd, forsakes her watery cave, 

And lifts her lovely head above the wave ; 

The snowy splendours of her modest ray 

Stream o'er the glistening waves, and glistening play : 

Around her, glittering on the heaven's arch'd brow, 

Unnumber'd stars enclosed in azure glow. 

Thick as the dewdrops in the April dawn, 

Or May flowers crowding o'er the daisy lawn. 

The canvas whitens in the silvery beam. 

And with a mild pale-red the pendants gleam ; 

The masts' tall shadows tremble o'er the deep, 

The peaceful lines a holy silence keep ; 

The -watchman's carol, echoed from the prows. 

Alone, at times, awakes the still repose." 
In this beautiful sea-piece the circumstance of " the mast's tall shadow- 
trembling o'er the deep," and of the " carol of the watchman echoed from 
the prows," are touches of the translator's addition. Mickle has, however, 
got more credit for improving ' The Lusiad ' than he deserves. 



MICKLE. 36: 



Although he was not responsible for the faults of the original, 
he has taken abundance of pains to defend them in his notes and 
preface. In this he has not been successful. The long lecture 
on geography and Portuguese history which Gama delivers to 
the King of Melinda is a wearisome interruption to tlie narra- 
tive ; and the use of Pagan mythology is a radical and unan- 
swerable defect. Mickle informs us as an apology for the latter 
circumstance that all this Pagan machinery was allegorical, and 
that the gods and goddesses of Homer were allegorical also ; an 
assertion which would require to be proved before it can be ad- 
mitted. Camoens himself has said something about his conceal- 
ment of a moral meaning under his Pagan deities ; but if he has 
any such morality it is so well hidden that it is impossible to 
discover it. The Venus of * The Lusiad,' we are told, is 
Divine Love ; and how is this Divine Love employed ? For no 
other end than to give the poet an opportunity of displaying a 
scene of sensual gratification, an island is purposely raised up in 
the ocean ; Venus conducts De Gama and his followers to this 
blessed spot, where a bevy of the nymphs of Venus are very 
good-naturedly prepared to treat them to their favours, not as 
a trial, but as a reward for their virtues ! Voltaire was certainly 
justified in pronouncing this episode a piece of gratuitous inde- 
cency. In the same allegorical spirit, no doubt, Bacchus, who 
opposes the Portuguese discoverers in the councils of Heaven, 
disguises himself as a Popish priest, and celebrates the rites of 
the Catholic religion. The imagination is somewhat puzzled to 
discover why Bacchus should be an enemy to the natives of a 
country the soil of which is so productive of his beverage, and 
a friend to the Mahometans, who forbid the use of it ; altiiough 
there is something amusing in the idea of the jolly god officiating 
as a Romish clergyman. 

Mickle's story of ' Syr Martyn ' is the most pleasing of his 
original pieces. The object of the narrative is to exhibit the de- 
grading effects of concubinage, in the history of an amiable man, 
who is reduced to despondency and sottishness under the dominion 
of a beldam and a slattern. The defect of the moral is, that the 
same evils might have happened to Syr Martyn in a state of ma- 
trimony. The simplicity of the tale is also, unhappily, overlaid 
^v a weight of allegory and of obsolete phraseology which it has 
not importance to sustain. Such a style, applied to the history 



368 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

of a man and his housekeeper, is like building a diminutive dwell- 
ing in all the pomp of Gothic architecture.* 



TIMOTHY DT^^GHT. 

Of this American poet I am sorry to be able to give the British 
reader no account. I believe his personal history is as little 
koown as his poetry on this side of the Atlantic. 



THOMAS WARTON. 

[Born, 1728. Died, 1790.] 

Thomas Wartox was descended from an ancient family, whose 
residence was at Beverley, in Yorkshire. One of his ancestors 
was knighted in the civil wars for his adherence to Charles I. ; 
but by the failure of the same cause the estate of the family was 
confiscated, and they were unable to maintain the rank of gentry. 
The Toryism of the historian of English poetr}^ was, therefore, 
hereditary. His father was fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford ; 
professor of poetry in that university ; and vicar of Basingstoke, 
in Hants, and of Cobham, in Surrey. At the age of sixteen our 
author was admitted a commoner of Trinity College, Oxford, of 
which he continued a member, and an ornament, for forty-seven 
years. His first poetical appearance in print has been traced to 
five eclogues in blank verse, the scenes of which are laid among 
the shepherds oppressed by the wars in Germany. They 
appeared in Pearch's ' Supplement to Dodsley's Collection of 
Fugitive Pieces/ Warton disavowed those eclogues in his riper 
years. They are not discreditable to him as the verses of a boy ; 
but it was a superfluous offering to the public to subjoin them to 
his other works in Mr, Chalmers' edition of ' The British Poets.'j 

* [Mickle -was the author of that very beautiful song, * There 's nae luck 
about the house,' and on his ballad of ' Cumnor Hall' Scott founded his 
romance of ' Kenilworth.'] 

t [Mr. Southey, in his review of Chalmers' collection, is of a different 
opinion. " A valuable addition is made," he says, " to T. Warton's works, 
by the discovery of five pastoral eclogues, the scenes of -which are laid among 
the shepherds oppressed by the war in Germany. They were published in 
1745, and ascribed to him on the competent authority of Isaac Reed. They 
are certainly remarkable productions for a youth of eighteen." — Quar. Rev., 
vol. xi.p. 501.] 



DWIGHT— T. WAETON. 369 

His poem, * The Pleasures of Melancholy,' was written not 
long after. As the composition of a youth, it is entitled to a 
very indulgent consideration ; and perhaps it gives promise of 
a sensibility which his subsequent poetry did not fulfil. It was 
professedly written in his seventeenth, but published in his nine- 
teenth year, so that it must be considered as testifying the state 
of his genius at the latter period, for until his work had passed 
through the press he would continue to improve it. In the year 
1749 he published his ' Triumph of Isis,' in answer to Mason's 
poetical attack on the loyalty of Oxford. The best passage in 
this piece, beginning with the lines, 

" Ye fretted pinnacles, ye fanes sublime, 
Ye towers, that wear the mossy vest of time," 

discovers that fondness for the beauties of architecture which 
was an absolute passion in the breast of Warton. Joseph War- 
ton relates, that, at an early period of their youth, his brother 
and he were taken by their father to see Windsor Castle. Old 
Dr. Warton '^omplained, that, whilst the rest of the party ex- 
pressed delight at the magnificent spectacle, Thomas made no 
remarks ; but Joseph Warton justly observes, that the silence of 
his brother was only a proof of the depth of his pleasure ; that 
he was really absorbed in the enjoyment of the sight ; and that 
hi^ subsequent fondness for '"'castle imagery, ^^ he believed, might 
be traced to the impression which he then received from Windsor 
Castle. 

In 1750 he took the degree of a master of arts, and in the 
following year succeeded to a fellowship. In 1754 he published 
his ' Observations on Spenser's Faery Queen,' in a single volume, 
which he afterwards expanded into two volumes in the edition 
of 1762. In this work he minutely analyses the classic and 
romantic sources of Spenser's fiction ; and so far enables us to 
estimate the power of the poet's genius that we can compare the 
scattered ore of his fanciful materials with their transmuted 
appearance in the * Faery Queen.' This work probably con- 
tributed to his appointment to the professorship of poetry in the 
university in 1757, which he held, according to custom, for ten 
years. While possessed of that chair, he delivered a course of 
lectures on poetry, in which he introduced his translations from 
tfce Greek Anthology, as well as the substance of his remarks 
on the Bucolic poetry of the Greeks, which were afterwards pub- 

2 B 



370 LIVES OP THE POETS. 

lished in his edition of * Theocritus/ In 1758 he assisted Dr. 
Johnson in ' The Idler,' with Nos. 33, 93, and 96. About the 
same time he published, without name or date, 'A Description 
of the City, College, and Cathedral of "Winchester ;' and a 
humorous account of Oxford, intended to burlesque the popular 
description of that place, entitled * A Companion to the Guide, 
or a Guide to the Companion.' He also published anonymously, 
in 1758, * A Selection of Latin Metrical Inscriptions.' 

Warton's clerical profession forms no very prominent part of 
his history. He had an indistinct and hurried articulation, which 
was peculiarly unfavourable to his pulpit oratory. His am- 
bition was directed to other objects than preferment in the church, 
and he was above solicitation. After having served the curacy of 
Woodstock for nine years as well as his avocations would permit, 
he was appointed in 1744 to the small living of Kiddington, in 
Oxfordshire, and in 1785 to the donative of Hill Farrance, in 
Somersetshire, by his own college. 

The great work to which the studies of his life were subservient 
was his ' History of English Poetry,' an undertaking which had 
been successively projected by Pope and Gray. Those writers 
had suggested the imposing plan of arranging the British poets, 
not by their chronological succession, but by their different 
schools. Warton deliberately relinquished this scheme, because 
he felt that it was impracticable, except in a very vague and 
general manner. Poetry is of too spiritual a nature to admit of 
its authors being exactly grouped by a Linnsean system of classi- 
fication. Striking resemblances and distinctions will, no doubt, 
be found among poets ; but the shades of variety and gradation 
are so infinite, that to bring every composer within a given line 
of resemblance would require a new language in the philosophy 
of taste. Warton therefore adopted the simpler idea of tracing 
our poetry by its chronological progress. The work is certainly 
provokingly digressive in many places, and those who have sub- 
sequently examined the same subject have often complained of its 
inaccuracies ; but the chief cause of those inaccuracies was that 
boldness and extent of research which makes the work so useful 
and entertaining. Those who detected his mistakes have been, 
in no small degree, indebted to him for their power of detecting 
them. The first volume of his ' History ' appeared in 1774, the 
second in 1778, and the third in 1781. Of the fourth volume 



THOMAS WARTON. 371 



only a few sheets were printed ; and the account of our poetry, 
which he meant to have extended to the last century, was conti- 
nued only to the reign of Elizabeth. 

In the year 1785 he was appointed to the Camden Professor- 
ship of History, in which situation he delivered only one inaugural 
dissertation. In the same year, upon the death of Whitehead, he 
received the laureateship. His odes were subjected to the ridi- 
cule of ' The Eolliad ;' but his head filled the laurel with more 
learning than it had encompassed for a hundred years. 

In his sixty-second year, after a life of uninterrupted good 
health, he was attacked by the gout, went to Bath for a cure, 
and returned, as he imagined, perfectly recovered ; but his 
appearance betrayed that his constitution had received a fatal 
shock. At the close of an evening which he had spent with more 
than ordinary cheerfulness, in the common -hall of his college, 
he was seized with a paralytic stroke, and expired on the follow- 
ing day. 

Some amusing eccentricities of his character are mentioned 
by the writer of his life (Dr. Mant), which the last editor of ' The 
British Poets ' * blames that biographer for introducing. I am 
far from joining in this censure. It is a miserable system of 
biography that would never allow us to smile at the foibles and 
peculiarities of its subject. The historian of English poetry would 
sometimes forget his own dignity so far as to drink ale and smoke 
tobacco with men of vulgar condition ; either wishing, as some 
have gravely alleged, to study undisguised and unlettered human 
nature, or, which is more probable, to enjoy a heartier laugh and 
broader humour than could be found in polite society. He was also 
passionately fond (not of critical, but) of military reviews, and 
delighted in martial music. The same strength of association which 
made him enjoy the sound of " the spirit-stirring drum " led him 
to be a constant and curious explorer of the architectural monu- 
ments of chivalrous times ; and during his summer excursions 
into the country he always committed to paper the remarks which 
he had made on ancient buildings. During his visits to his bro- 
ther. Dr. J. Warton, the reverend professor became an associate 

* [The late Alexander Chalmers. Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Campbell 
■were to have edited this collection, which fell, as many a noble project has 
done, into the hands of a mere hack in literature, not destitute of knowledge, 
but without the means of using it properly, and without taste. — See Lock- 
hart's Life of Scott, Yol. ii. p. 240, 2nd ed.] 

2 B 2 



372 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

and confidant in all the sports of the schoolboys. When engaged 
with them in some culinary occupation, and when alarmed by the 
sudden approach of the master, he has been known to hide him- 
self in a dark corner of the kitchen, and has been dragged from 
thence by the doctor, who had taken him for some great boy. 
He also used to help the boys in their exercises, generally putting 
in as many faults as would disguise the assistance. 

Every Englishman who values the literature of his country 
must feel himself obliged to Warton as a poetical antiquary. As 
a poet, he is ranked by his brother Joseph in the school of Spenser 
and Milton ; but this classification can only be admitted with a 
full understanding of the immense distance between him and his 
great masters. He had, indeed, "spelt the fabled rhyme;" he 
abounds in allusions to the romantic subjects of Spenser, and he 
is a sedulous imitator of the rich lyrical manner of Milton: but 
of the tenderness and peculiar harmony of Spenser he has caught 
nothing; and in his resemblance to Milton he is the heir of his 
phraseology more than his spirit. His imitation of manner, how- 
ever, is not confined to Milton. His style often exhibits a very 
composite order of poetical architecture. In his ' Verses to Sir 
Joshua Reynolds,' for instance, he blends the point and succinct- 
ness of Pope with the richness of the elder and more fanciful 
school. It is one of his happiest compositions ; and in this case 
the intermixture of styles has no unpleasing eifect. In others he 
often tastelessly and elaborately unites his affectation of antiquity 
with the case-hardened graces of modern polish. 

If we judge of him by the character of the majority of his 
pieces, I believe that fifty out of sixty of them are such that we 
should not be anxious to give them a second perusal. From that 
proportion of his works I conceive that an unprejudiced reader 
would pronounce him a florid, unaffecting describer, whose images 
are plentifully scattered, but without selection or relief. To 
confine our view, however, to some seven or eight of his happier 
pieces, we shall find in these a considerable degree of graphic 
power, of fancy, and animation. His ' Verses to Sir Joshua 
Keynolds ' are splendid and spirited. There is also a softness 
and sweetness in his ode entitled ' The Hamlet,' which is the 
more welcome for being rare in his productions ; and his ' Cru- 
sade ' and ' Grave of Arthur ' have a genuine air of martial and 
minstrel enthusiasm. Those pieces exhibit, to the best adva;> 



BLACKLOCK. 373 



tage, the most striking feature of his poetical character, which 
was a fondness for the recollections of chivalry, and a minute in- 
timacy of imagination with its gorgeous residences and imposing 
spectacles. The spirit of chivalry he may indeed be said to have 
revived in the poetry of modern times. His memory was richly 
stored with all the materials for description that can be got from 
books; and he seems not to have been without an original 
enthusiasm for those objects which excite strong associations of 
regard and wonder. Whether he would have ever looked with 
interest on a shepherd's cottage if he had not found it described 
by Virgil or Theocritus may be fairly doubted ; but objects of 
terror, splendour, and magnificence are evidently congenial to his 
fancy. He is very impressive in sketching the appearance of an 
ancient Gothic castle in the following lines : — 

" High o"er the trackless heath, at midnight seen, 
No more the windows, ranged in long array 
(Where the tall shaft and fretted nook between 
Thick ivy twines), the taper'd rites betray." 

His memory was stored with an uncommon portion of that know- 
ledge which supplies materials for picturesque description ; and 
his universal acquaintance with our poets supplied him with 
expression, so as to answer the full demand of his original ideas. 
Of his poetic invention in the fair sense of the word, of his depth 
of sensibility, or of his powers of reflection, it is not so easy to 
say anything favourable.* 



THOMAS BLACKLOCK. 

[Born, 1721. Died, 1791.] 

Thomas Blacklock was born at Annan, in Dumfriesshire, 
where his father was a bricklayer. Before he was six months 
old he was totally deprived of sight by the small-pox. From an 
early age he discovered a fondness for listening to books, espe- 
cially to those in poetry ; and by the kindness of his friends and 
relations he acquired a slight acquaintance with the Latin tongue, 
and with some of the popular English classics. He began also, 
when very young, to compose verses ; and some of these having 

* [In the best of Warton"s poems there is a stiffness which too often gives 
them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. — Coleridge. 
^ Thomas Warton has sent me his ' Inscriptions/ which are rather too 
simple for my taste — -Shenstone.] 



374 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

been shown to Dr. Stevenson, an eminent physician of the Scot- 
tish capital, the doctor benevolently took him to Edinburgh, 
where Blacklock improved his knowledge of Latin, and com- 
pleted his studies at the university. The publication of his 
poems excited a general interest in his favour, and Professor 
Spence, of Oxford, having prefixed to them an account of his 
life and character, a second edition of them was liberally en- 
couraged in London. In 1759 he was licensed as a preacher of 
the Scottish church. He soon afterwards married a Miss John- 
ston, a very worthy but homely woman ; whose beauty, however, 
he was accustomed to extol with an ecstacy that made his friends 
regard his blindness as, in one instance, no misfortune. By the 
patronage of the Earl of Selkirk he was presented to the living 
of Kirkcudbright ; but in consequence of the violent objections 
that were made by the parishioners to having a blind man for 
their clergyman, he resigned the living, and accepted of a small 
annuity in ils stead. With this slender provision he returned to 
Edinburgh, and subsisted for the rest of his life by taking young 
gentlemen as boarders in his house, whom he occasionally assisted 
in their studies. 

He published an interesting article on Blindness in the ' En- 
cyclopaedia Britannica,' and a work entitled ' Paraclesis, or Con- 
solations of Eeligion,' in two dissertations, the one original, the 
other translated from a work which has been sometimes ascribed 
to Cicero, but which is more generally believed to have been 
written by Vigonius of Padua. He died of a nervous fever, at 
the age of seventy. 

Blacklock was a gentle and social being, but prone to melan- 
choly ; probably more from constitution than from the circum- 
stance of his blindness, which he so often and so deeply deplores. 
From this despondent disposition he sought refuge in conversa- 
tion and music. He w^as a tolerable performer on the flute, and 
used to carry a flageolet in his pocket, on which he was not dis- 
pleased to be solicited for a tune. 

His verses are extraordinary for a man blind from his infancy ; 
but Mr. Henry Mackenzie, in his elegant biographical account 
of him, has certainly overrated his genius : and when Mr. Spence, 
of Oxford, submitted Blacklock's descriptive powers as a problem 
for metaphysicians to resolve, he attributed to his writings a 
degree of descriptive strength which they do not possess. De- 



ROBERTS. 375 



iiina * carried exaggeration to the utmost when he declared that 
Blacklock would seem a fable to posterity as he had been a pro- 
digy to his contemporaries. It is no doubt curious that his 
memory should have retained so many forms of expression for 
things which he had never seen ; but those who have conversed 
with intelligent persons who have been blind from their infancy 
must have often remarked in them a familiarity of language 
respecting the objects of vision which, though not easy to be 
accounted for, will be found sufficiently common to make the 
rhymes of Blacklock appear far short of marvellous. Blacklock, 
on more than one occasion, betrays something like marks of 

blindness. I 

♦ 

WILLIAM HAYWARD ROBERTS. 

[Born, 1745. Died, 1791.] 

He was educated at Eton, and from thence was elected to King's 
College, Cambridge, where he took the degree of master of arts, 
and of doctor in divinity. From being an under master at Eton 
he finally rose to be provost of the college, in the year 1781. 
He was also chaplain to the King, and rector of Farnham Royal, 
in Buckinghamshire. In 1771 he published, in three parts, ' A 
Poetical Essay on the Attributes and Providence of the Deity ;' 
two years afterwards, ' A Poetical Epistle to Christopher Anstey,' 
on the English poets, chiefly those who had written in blank 
verse ; and in 1774 his poem of * Judah Restored,' a work of no 
common merit.J 

* In his ' Discorso della Litteratura.' 

t [Blacklock's poetry sleeps secure in undisturbed mediocrity, and Black- 
lock himself is best remembered from Johnson's reverential look and the 
influence a letter of his had upon the fate and fortunes of Burns.] 

X [Dr. Roberts's ' Judah Restored ' was one of the first books that I ever 
possessed. It was given me by a lady whom I must ever gratefully remem- 
ber as the kindest friend of my boyhood. I read it often then, and can still 
recur to it with satisfaction ; and perhaps I owe something to the plain dig- 
nity of its style, which is suited to the subject, and everywhere bears the 
stamp of good sense and careful erudition. To acknowledge obligations of 
this kind is both a pleasure and a duty. — Southey, Life of Cowper, iii. 32. 

The Editor possesses Southey's copy of the ' Judah,' with the following 
inscription in it in the poet's neat handwriting : — " Robert Southey : given 
me by Mrs. Dolignon, 1784.] 



376 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

SIR WILLIAM JONES. 

[Born, 1746. Died, 1794.] 

Sir William Jones is not a great poet ; but his name recalls 
such associations of worth, intellect, and accomplishments, that. 
if these sketches were not necessarily and designedly only minia- 
tures of biography, I should feel it a sort of sacrilege to consign 
to scanty and inadequate bounds the life of a scholar who, in 
feeding the lamp of knowledge, may be truly said to have prema- 
turely exhausted the lamp of life. 

He was born in London. His father, who it is said could 
trace his descent from the ancient princes of North Wales, and 
who, like his son, was no discredit to his lineage, was so eminent 
a mathematician as to be distinguished by the esteem of Newton 
and Halley. His first employment had been that of a school- 
master on board a man-of-war ; and in that situation he attracted 
the notice and friendship of Lord Anson. An anecdote is told 
of him, that at the siege of Vigo he was one of the party who 
had the liberty of pillaging the captured town. With no very 
rapacious views, he selected a bookseller's shop for his share ; 
but, finding no book worth taking away, he carried ofi" a pair of 
scissors, which he used to show his friends, as a trophy of his 
military success. On his return to England he established him- 
self as a teacher of mathematics, and published several scientific 
works, which were remarkable for their neatness of illustration 
and brevity of style. By his labours as a teacher he acquired a 
small fortune, but lost it through the failure of a banker. His 
friend, Lord Macclesfield, however, in some degree indemnified 
him for the loss, by procuring for him a sinecure place under 
government. Sir William Jones lost this valuable parent when 
he was only three years old ; so that the care of his first education 
devolved upon his mother. She also was a person of superior 
endowments, and cultivated his dawning powers with a sagacious 
assiduity which undoubtedly contributed to their quick and sur- 
prising growth. We may judge of what a pupil she had, when 
we are told that, at five years of age, one morning, in turning 
over the leaves of a Bible, he fixed his attention with the strongest 
admiration on a sublime passage in the Revelation. Human 
nature perhaps presents no authentic picture of its felicity more 



SIR WILLIAM JONES. 377 

pure or satisfactory than that of such a pupil superintended by a 
mother capable of directing him. 

At the age of seven he went to Harrow school, where his 
progress was at first interrupted by an accident which he met 
with in having his thigh-bone broken, and he was obliged to be 
taken home for about a twelvemonth. But after his return his 
abilities were so distinguished, that before he left Harrow he 
was shown to strangers as an ornament to the seminary. Before 
he had reached this eminence at school, it is a fact, disgraceful 
to one of his teachers, that, in consequence of the ground which 
he had lost by the accident already mentioned, he was frequently 
subjected to punishment for exertions which he could not make, 
or, to use his own expression, for not being able to soar before 
he had been taught to fly. The system of severity must have 
been merciless indeed when it applied to Jones, of whom his 
master, Dr. Thackery, used to say that he was a boy of so active 
a spirit, that, if left friendless and naked on Salisbury Plain, he 
would make his way to fame and fortune. It is related of him, 
that while at Harrow, his fellow-scholars having determined to 
act the play of ' The Tempest,' they were at a loss for a copy, 
and that young Jones wrote out the whole from memory. Such 
miracles of human recollection are certainly on record, but it 
is not easy to conceive the boys at Harrow, when permitted by 
their masters to act a play, to have been at a loss for a copy of 
Shakspeare, and some mistake or exaggeration may be suspected 
in the anecdote. He possibly abridged the play for the particular 
occasion. Before leaving Harrow school he learned the Arabic 
characters, and studied the Hebrew language so as to enable 
him to read some of the original Psalms. What would have 
been labour to others was Jones's amusement. He used to relax 
his mind with Phillidor's * Lessons at Chess,' and with studying 
botany and fossils. 

In his eighteenth year he was entered of University College, 
Oxford, where his residence was rendered more agreeable by his 
mother taking up her abode in the town. He was also, fortu- 
nately, permitted by his teachers to forsake the study of dialectic 
logic, which still haunted the college, for that of Oriental lite- 
rature ; and he was so zealous in this pursuit that he brought 
from London to Oxford a native of Aleppo, whom he maintained 
at his own expense, for the benefit of his instructions in Arabic. 



378 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

He also began the study of modern Persic, and found his ex- 
ertions rewarded with rapid success. His vacations were spent 
in London, where he attended schools for riding and fencing, 
and studied Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. He pursued in 
theory, and even exceeded in practice, the plan of education pro- 
jected by Milton ; and boasted that with the fortune of a peasant 
he could give himself the education of a prince. He obtained 
a fellowship at Oxford ; but before he obtained it, whilst he was 
yet fearful of his success, and of burthening the slender finances 
of an affectionate mother for his support, he accepted the situa- 
tion of tutor to Lord Althorp, the son of Earl Spencer. In the 
summer of 1765 he repaired to Wimbledon Park, to take upon 
himself the charge of his young pupil. He had not been long 
in Lord Spencer's family when he was flattered by an offer from 
the Duke of Grafton of the place of interpreter of Eastern 
languages. This situation, though it might not have interfered 
with his other pursuits, he thought fit to decline; but earnestly 
requested that it might be given to his Syrian teacher, Mirza, 
whose character he wrote. The solicitation was, however, un- 
noticed ; and the event only gave him an opportunity of regret- 
ting his own ignorance of the world in not accepting the proffered 
office, that he might consign its emoluments to INIirza. At 
Wimbledon he first formed his acquaintance with the daughter 
of Dr. Shipley, the Dean of Winchester, to which he owed the 
future happiness of his life. The ensuing winter, 1766, he re- 
moved with Lord Spencer's family to London, where he renewed 
his pursuit of external as well as intellectual accomplishments, 
and received lessons from Gallini as well as Angelo. It is 
amusing to find his biographer add that he took lessons at the 
broadsword from an old Chelsea pensioner, seamed with scars, to 
whose military narrations he used to listen with delight. 

In 1767 he made a short trip with the family of his pupil to 
the Continent, where, at Spa, he pursued the study of Genuan, 
and availed himself of the opportunity of finding an incomparable 
teacher of dancing, whose name was Janson. In the following 
year he was requested by the secretary of the Duke of Grafton 
to undertake a task in which no other scholar in England was 
found willing to engage, namely, in furnishing a version of an 
Eastern MS., a life of Nadir Shaw, which the King of Denmark 
had brought with him to England, and which Ms Danish Majesty 



SIR WILLIAM JONES. 379 

was anxious to have translated into French. Mr. Jones undertook 
the translation from a laudable reluctance to allow the MS. to be 
carried out of the country for want of a translator, although the 
subject was dry, and the style of the original difficult, and 
although it obliged him to submit his translation to a native of 
France, in order to give it the idioms of a French style. He 
was at this time only twenty-one years of age. The only reward 
which he obtained for his labour was a diploma from the Royal 
Society of Copenhagen, and a recommendation from the court of 
Denmark to his own sovereign. To ' The History of Nadir 
Shaw ' he added a treatise of his own on Oriental poetry, in the 
language of the translation. In the same year he began the 
study of music, and took some lessons on the Welsh harp. 

In 1770 he again visited the Continent with the Spencer 
family, and travelled into Italy. The genius which interests us 
at home redoubles its interest on foreign ground ; but it would 
appear, from Jones's letters, that in this instance he was too 
assiduous a scholar to be an amusing traveller. His mind, 
during this visit to the Continent, was less intent on men and 
manners than on objects which he might have studied with equal 
advantage at home. We find him deciphering Chinese, and com- 
posing a tragedy. The tragedy has been irrecoverably lost. Its 
subject was the death of Mustapha, the son of Soliman ; the same 
on w hich Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, composed a drama. 

On his return to England he determined to embrace the law 
as a profession, the study of which he commenced in 1771, being 
then in his twenty-fourth year. His motives for choosing this 
profession are best explained in his own words. In a letter to 
his friend Schultens he avows at once the public ambition and 
personal pride which had now grown up wilh the maturity of 
his character. " The die," he says, " is cast. All my books 
and MSS., with the exception of those only which relate to law 
and oratory, are locked up at Oxford ; and I have determined, 
for the next twenty years at least, to renounce all studies but 
those which are connected with my profession. It is needless to 
trouble you with my reasons at length for this determination. 
I will only say that, if I had lived at Rome or Athens, I should 
have preferred the labours, studies, and dangers of their orators 
and illustrious citizens, connected as they were with banishment 
and even death, to the groves of the poets, or the gardens of the 



380 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



philosophers. Here I adopt the same resolution. * * * * 
If the study of the law were really unpleasant and disgusting, 
which is far from the truth, the example of the wisest of the 
ancients and of Minerva would justify me in preferring the useful 
olive to the barren laurel. To tell you my mind freely, I am 
not of a disposition to bear the arrogance of men of rank, to 
which poets and men of letters are so often obliged to submit." 

This letter was written some years after he had resigned his 
situation in Lord Spencer's family, and entered himself of the 
Middle Temple. In the mean time, though the motives which 
guided him to the choice of a profession undoubtedly made him 
in earnest with his legal studies, he still found spare hours to 
devote to literature. He finished his tragedy of ' Mustapha,' and 
sketched two very ambitious plans — the one of an epic poem, the 
other of a Turkish history. That he could have written a useful 
and amusing history of Turkey is easy to suppose ; but the out- 
line and the few specimens of his intended epic leave little room 
for regret that it was not finished. Its subject was the discovery 
of Britain ; the cliaraclers Tyrian, and the machinery allegorical, 
in the manner of Spenser. More unpromising symptoms of a 
poem could hardly be announced. 

In 1772 he published his French Letter to Du Perron, the 
French traveller, who, in his account of his travels in India, had 
treated the University of Oxford, and some of its members, with 
disrespect. In this publication he corrected the French writer, 
perhaps, with more asperity than his maturer judgment would 
have approved. In the same year he published a small volume 
of poems, with two dissertations — one on Oriental literature, and 
another on the arts commonly called imitative. In his * Essay 
on the Arts,' he objects, on very fair grounds, to the Aristotelian 
doctrine of the universal object of poetry being imitation. Cer- 
tainly, no species of poetry can strictly be said to be imitative 
of nature except that which is dramatic. Mr. Twining, the 
translator of the * Poetics,' has, however, explained this theory 
of Aristotle pretty satisfactorily, by showing that, when he spoke 
of poetry as imitative, he alluded to what he conceived to be the 
highest department of the art, namely, the drama ; or to the 
dramatic part of epic poetry, the dialogue, which, in recita- 
tion, afforded an actual imitation of the passions which were 
described. 



SIR WILLIAM JONES. 381 

When Mr. Jones had been called to the bar, he found that no 
human industry could effectively unite the pursuits of literature 
Avith the practice of the profession. He therefore took the reso- 
lution, already alluded to in one of his letters, of abstaining from 
all study but that of the science and eloquence of the bar. He 
thought, however, that, consistently with this resolution, he might 
translate ' The Greek Orations of Isaeus, in cases relating to 
Succession to doubtful Property.' This translation appeared in 
1778. In the interval his practice became considerable, and 
he was made, in 1776, a commissioner of bankrupts. He was at 
this time a member of the Royal Society, and maintained an 
epistolary correspondence with several eminent foreign scholars. 
Among those correspondents, his favourite seems to have been 
Reviczki, an Oriental scholar, whom he met in England, and 
who was afterwards the Imperial minister at Warsaw. 

From the commencement of the American war, and during 
its whole progress, Mr. Jones's political principles led him to a 
decided disapprobation of the measures of government which 
were pursued in that contest. But though politically opposed 
to Lord North, he possessed so much of the personal favour of 
that minister as to have some hopes of obtaining, by his influence, 
a seat on the Bench of Fort William, in Bengal, which became 
vacant in the year 1780. While this matter was in suspense, he 
was advised to stand as a candidate for the representation of the 
University of Oxford ; but finding there was no chance of suc- 
cess, he declined the contest before the day of election ; his 
political principles, and an ' Ode to Liberty ' which he had pub- 
lished, having offended the majority of the academic voters. 
During the riots of 1780 he published a plan for security against 
insurrection, and for defence against invasion, which has since 
been realised in the volunteer system. During the same year 
he paid a short visit to Paris ; and at one time intended to have 
proceeded to America, for a professional object, namely, to pro- 
cure for a client and friend the restitution of an estate which 
the government of the United States had confiscated. The in- 
disposition of his friend, however, prevented him from crossing 
the Atlantic. On his return to England he recurred to his 
favourite Oriental studies, and completed a translation of the 
seven ancient Arabian poems, famous for having been once sus- 
pended in the Temple of Mecca ; as well as another poem, in 



382 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

the same language, more curious than inviting in its subject, 
which was the Mahomedan law of succession to intestates. The 
latter work had but few charms to reward his labour ; but it 
gave him an opportunity for displaying his literary and legal 
fitness for the station in India to which he still aspired. 

Besides retracing his favourite studies with the Eastern Muses, 
we find him at this period warmly engaged in political as well 
as professional pursuits. An ' Essay on the Law of Bailments,' 
an ' Address to the Inhabitants of Westminster on Parliamentary 
Reform' — these publications, together with occasional pieces of 
poetry which he wrote within the last years of his residence in 
England, attest at once the vigour and elegance of his mind, and 
the variety of its application. 

On the succession of the Shelburne administration he obtained, 
through the particular interest of Lord Ashburton, the judicial 
office in Bengal for which he had been hitherto an unsuccessful 
competitor. In March 1783 he received the honour of knight- 
hood. In the April following he married Anna Maria Shipley, 
the daughter of the Bishop of St. Asaph, to whom he had been 
so many years attached. He immediately sailed for India, having 
secured, as his friend Lord Ashburton congratulated him, the 
two first objects of human pursuit, those of love and ambition. 
The joy with which he contemplated his situation is strongly 
testified in the descriptions of his feelings which he gives in his 
letters, and in the gigantic plans of literature which he sketched 
out. Happily married — still in the prime of life — leaving at 
home a reputation which had reached the hemisphere he was to 
visit — he bade adieu to the turbulence of party politics, which, 
though it had not dissolved any of his friendships, had made some 
of them irksome. The scenes which he had delighted to con- 
template at a distance were now inviting his closest researches I 
He approached regions and manners w hich gave a living picture 
of antiquity ; and, while his curiosity was heightened, he drew 
nearer to the means of its gratification. 

In December 1783 he commenced the discharge of his duties 
as an Indian judge with his characteristic ardour. He also 

besran the studv of Sanscrit. He had been but a few vears in 

J? "^ » 

India when his knowledge of that ancient language enabled him, 
under the auspices of the Governor, to commence a great plan 
for administering justice among the Indians, by compiling a 



SIR WILLIAM JONES. 383 

digest of Hindu and Mahomedan laws, similar to that which 
Justinian gave his Greek and Roman subjects. His part in the 
project was only to survey and arrange its materials. To that 
superintendence the Brahmins themselves submitted Vith perfect 
confidence. To detail his share in the labours of the Society of 
Calcutta, the earliest, or at least the most important, philoso- 
phical society established in British India, would be almost to 
abridge its ' Transactions' during his lifetime. He took the lead 
in founding it, and lived to see three volumes of its ' Transactions' 
appear. In 1789 he translated the ancient Hindu drama, ' Sa- 
contala, or the Fatal Ring,' by Callidas, an author whom Sir 
William Jones calls the Shakspeare of India, and who lived 
about the time of Terence, in the first century before the Chris- 
tian era. This antique picture of Hindu manners is certainly 
the greatest curiosity which the study of Oriental literature by 
Europeans has brought to light. In 1794 he published, also 
from the Sanscrit, a translation of the Ordinances of Menu, who 
is esteemed by the Hindoos to be the earliest of created beings, 
and the holiest of legislators ; but who appears, by the English 
translator's confession, to have lived long after priests, statesmen, 
and metaphysicians had learned to combine their crafts. 

While business required his daily attendance at Calcutta, his 
usual residence was on the banks of the Ganges, at the distance 
of five miles from the court. To this spot he returned every 
evening after sunset ; and, in the morning, rose so early as to 
reach his apartments in time by setting out on foot at the first 
appearance of dawn. He passed the months of vacation at 
Chrishnagur, a country residence, sixty miles from Calcutta, 
remarkable for its beauty, and interesting from having been the 
seat of an ancient Hindu college. Here he added botany to the 
other pursuits of his indefatigable curiosity. 

In the burning climate of Bengal it is not surprising that the 
strongest constitution should have sunk under the weight of his 
professional duties and of his extensive literary labours. The 
former alone occupied him seven hours^during the session-time. 
His health, indeed, seems to have been early affected in India. 
In 1793 the indisposition of Lady Jones rendered it necessary 
that she should return to England. Sir William proposed to 
follow her in 1795, delaying only till he should complete the 
system of Indian legislation. But they parted to meet no more. 



384 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

In 1794 he was attacked with an inflammation of the liver, which 
acted with uncommon rapidity, and, before a physician was 
called in, had advanced too far to yield to the efficacy of medi- 
cine. He expired in a composed attitude, without a groan, or 
the appearance of a pang ; and retained an expression of com- 
placency on his features to the last. 

In the course of a short life Sir William Jones acquired a 
degree of knowledge which the ordinary faculties of men, if they 
were blessed with antediluvian longevity, could scarcely hope to 
surpass. His learning threw light on the laws of Greece and 
India, on the general literature of Asia, and on the history of 
the family of nations. He carried philosophy, eloquence, and 
philanthropy into his character of a lawyer and a judge. Amidst 
the driest toils of erudition, he retained a sensibility to the 
beauties of poetry, and a talent for transfusing them into his own 
languas^e, which has seldom been united with the same decree 
of industry. Had he written nothing but the delightful ode 
from Hafiz — - 

" Sweet maid, if thou wouldst charm my sight," 
it would alone testify the harmony of his ear and the elegance 
of his taste. When he went abroad it was not to enrich himself 
with the spoils of avarice or ambition, but to search, amidst the 
ruins of Oriental literature, for treasures which he would not 

have exchanged 

" For all Bokhara's vaunted gold, 
Or all the gems of Samarcand.' 

It is, nevertheless, impossible to avoid supposing that the 
activity of his mind spread itself in too many directions to be 
always employed to the best advantage. The impulse that car- 
ried him through so many pursuits has a look of something 
restless, inordinate, and ostentatious. Useful as he was, he would 
in all probability have been still more so, had his powers been 
concentrated to fewer objects. His poetry is sometimes elegant, 
but altogether it has too much of the florid luxury of the East. 
His taste would appear, in his latter years, to have fallen into a 
state of Brahminical idolatry, when he recommends to our par- 
ticular admiration, and translates in pompous lyrical diction, the 
Indian description of Cumara, the daughter of Ocean, riding 
upon a peacock ; and enjoins us to admire, as an allegory equally 
new and beautiful, the unimaginable conceit of Camdeo, the 



BURNS. S85 



Indian Cupid, having a bow that is made of flowers, and a bow- 
string which is a string of bees. Industrious as he was, his 
history is full of abandoned and half-executed projects. While 
his name reflects credit on poetical biography, his secondary fame 
as a composer shows that the palm of poetry is not likely to be 
won, even by great genius, without exclusive devotion to the 
pursuit.* — 

*' 'AWa o^TTcos a/JLa iravra Svvrjcreai avrhs kXecQai i 
"AWcp jxkv yap e5a>/c6 6ehs TroAe/^Tjia epya, 
AAAcf) Se opxnf^TVU, erepcf} KiQapiv koI doid-fjv.''^ 

Iliad, xiv. 729. 



ROBERT BURNS. 

[Born, 1758. Died, 1796.] 

Robert Burns was born near the town of Ayr, within a few 
hundred yards of " Alloway's auld haunted kirk," in a clay cot- 
tage, which his father, who was a small farmer and gardener, had 
built with his own hands. A part of this humble edifice gave 
way when the poet was but a few days old ; and his mother and 
he were carried, at midnight, through the storm, to a neighbour's 
house that gave them shelter. After having received some 
lessons in his childhood from the schoolmaster of the village of 
Alloway, he was, at seven years of age, put under a teacher of 
the name of Murdoch, who instructed him in reading and English 
grammar. This good man, who is still alive, and a teacher of 
languages in London, boasts, with a very natural triumph, of 
having accurately instructed Burns in the first principles of com- 
position. f At such an age, Burns's study of principles could not 
be very profound ; yet it is due to his early instructor to observe 
that his prose style is more accurate than we should expect even 
from the vigour of an untutored mind, and such as would lead 
us to suppose that he had been early initiated in the rules of 
grammar. His father's removal to another farm in Ayrshire, at 
Mount Oliphant, unfortunately deprived him of the benefit of 
Murdoch as an instructor, after he had been about two years 
under his care ; and for a long time he received no other lessons 

* [It is not Sir William Jones's poetry that can perpetuate his name. — 
Southey, Quar. Rev., vol. xi. p. 502. J 

f [Murdoch died about the year 1822, respected and poor.] 

2c 



386 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

than those which his father gave him in writing and arithmetic, 
wlien he instructed his family by the fireside of their cottage in 
winter evenings. About the age of thirteen he was sent, during 
a part of the summer, to the parish school in Dalrymple, in 
order to improve his handwriting. In the following year he 
had an opportunity of passing several weeks with his old friend 
Murdoch, with whose assistance he began to study French with 
intense ardour and assiduity. His proficiency in that language, 
though it was wonderful considering his opportunities, was neces- 
sarily slight ; yet it was in showing this accomplishment alone 
that Burns's weakness ever took the shape of vanity. One of his 
friends, who carried him into the company of a French lady, 
remarked, with surprise, that he attempted to converse with her 
in her own tongue. Their French, however, was soon found to 
be almost mutually unintelligible. As far as Burns could make 
himself understood, he unfortunately offended the foreign lady. 
He meant to tell her that she was a charming person, and de- 
lightful in conversation ; but expressed himself so as to appear to 
her to mean that she was fond of speaking : to which the Gallic 
dame indignantly replied, that it was quite as common for poets 
to be impertinent, as for women to be loquacious.* 

At the age of nineteen he received a few months' instruction 
in land-surveying. — Such is the scanty history of his education, 
which is interesting simply because its opportunities were so few 
and precarious, and such as only a gifted mind could have turned 
to any account. 

Of his early reading, he tells us, that a Life of Hannibal, which 
Murdoch gave him when a boy, raised the first stirrings of his 
enthusiasm ; and he adds, with his own fervid expression, " that 
the Life of Sir William Wallace poured a tide of Scottish 'preju- 
dices into his veins, which would boil along there till the flood- 
gates of life were shut in eternal rest.""|" In his sixteenth year 
he had read some of the plays of Shakspeare, the works of Pope 
and Addison, and of the Scottish poets Kamsay and Fergusson. 
From the volumes of Locke, Ray, Derham, and Stackhouse, be 
also imbibed a smattering of natural history and theolog}- ; but 
his brother assures us that, until the time of his being known as 

* [This story is in no account of Burns's life that we have ever seen, be- 
fore or since Mr. Campbell wrote.] 
t From his letter to Dr. Moore. 



BURNS. 387 



an author, he continued to be but imperfectly acquainted with 
the most eminent of our English writers. Thanks to the songs 
and superstition of his native country, his genius had some fos- 
tering aliments, which perhaps the study of classical authors 
might have led him to neglect. His inspiration grew up like the 
flower, which owes to heaven, in a barren soil, a natural beauty 
and wildness of fragrance that would be spoiled by artificial cul- 
ture. He learned an infinite number of old ballads, from hearing 
his mother sing them at her wheel ; and he was instructed in all 
the venerable heraldry of devils and witches by an ancient woman 
in the neighbourhood, " the Sybelline nurse of his Muse" who 
probably first imparted to him the story of ' Tam o'Shanter.' 
" Song was his favourite and first pursuit." " The song-book," he 
says, " was my Vade Mecum : I pored over it constantly, driving 
my cart, or walking to labour." It would be pleasing to dwell 
on this era of his youthful sensibility, if his life had been happy ; 
but it was far otherwise. He was the eldest of a family buffeted 
by misfortunes, toiling beyond their strength, and living without 
the support of animal food. At thirteen years of age he used to 
thresh in his father's barn ; and at fifteen was the principal 
labourer on the farm. After the toils of the day, he usually 
sank in the evening into dejection of spirits, and was afflicted 
with dull headaches, the joint result of anxiety, low diet, and 
fatigue. " This kind of life," he says, " the cheerless gloom of 
a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave, brought me 
to my sixteenth year, when love made me a poet." The object 
of his first attachment was a Highland girl named Mary Camp- 
bell, who was his fellow-reaper in the same harvest- field.* She 
died very young ; and when Burns heard of her death, he was 
thrown into an ecstacy of suffering much beyond what even his 
keen temperament was accustomed to feel. Nor does he seem 
ever to have forgotten her. His verses * To Mary in Heaven ;' 
his invocation to the star that rose on the anniversary of her 
death ; his description of the landscape that was the scene of 
their day of love and parting vows, where "flowers sprang wan- 
ton to be press'd ;" the whole luxury and exquisite passion of 
that strain, evince that her image had survived many important 
changes in himself. 

* [Mr. Campbell is mistaken in this : Burns's first love was his handsome 
Nell ; his Mary Campbell an after acquaintance.] 

2 c2 



388 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

From his seventeenth to his twenty-fourth year he lived as an 
assistant to his father, on another farm in Ayrshire, at Lochlea, 
to which they had removed from Mount Oliphant. During that 
period his brother Gilbert and he, besides labouring for their 
father, took a part of the land on their own account, for the 
purpose of raising flax ; and this speculation induced Robert to 
attempt establishing himself in the business of flax-dressino- in 
the neighbouring town of Irvine. But the unhealthiness of the 
business, and the accidental misfortune of his shop taking fire, 
induced him at the end of six months to abandon it. Whilst his 
father's affairs were growing desperate at Lochlea, the poet and 
his brother had taken a different farm on their own account, as 
an asylum for the family in case of the worst ; but from unfavour- 
able seasons and a bad soil, this speculation proved also unfor- 
tunate, and was given up. By this time Burns had formed his 
connexion with Jean Armour, who was afterwards his wife, a 
connexion which could no longer be concealed at the moment 
when the ruinous state of his affairs had determined him to cross 
the Atlantic, and to seek his fortune in Jamaica. He had even 
engaged himself as assistant overseer to a plantation. He pro- 
posed, however, to legalise the private contract of marriage 
which he had made with Jean, and, though he anticipated the 
necessity of leaving her behind him, he trusted to better days 
for their being re-united. But the parents of Jean were 
unwilling to dispose of her to a husband who was thus to be 
separated from her, and persuaded her to renounce the informal 
marriage. Burns also agreed to dissolve the connexion, though 
deeply wounded at the apparent willingness of his mistress to 
give him up, and overwhelmed with feelings of the most dis- 
tracting nature. He now [1786] prepared to embark for 
Jamaica, where his first situation would, in all probability, have 
been that of a negro-driver, when, before bidding a last adieu to 
his native country, he happily thought of publishing a collection 
of his poems. By this publication he g-ained about 20/., whicli 
seasonably saved him from indenting himself as a servant for 
Avant of money to procure a passage. With nine guineas out 
of this sum he had taken a steerage passage in the Clyde for 
Jamaica ; and to avoid the terrors of a jail he had been for some 
time skulking from covert to covert. He had taken a last leave 
of his friends, and had composed the last song which he thought 



BURNS. 389 



he should ever measure to Caledonia,* when the contents of a 
letter from Dr. Blacklock of Edinburgh to one of his friends, 
describing the encouragement which an edition of his poems 
would be likely to receive in the Scottish capital, suddenly lighted 
up all his prospects, and detained him from embarking. " I 
immediately posted,'* he says, " to Edinburgh, without a single 
acquaintance or letter of introduction. The baneful star which 
had so long shed its blasting influence on my zenith, for once 
made a revolution to the nadir." 

Though he speaks of having had no acquaintance in Edinburgh, 
he had been previously introduced in Ayrshire to Lord Daer, to 
Dugald Stewart, and to several respectable individuals, by the 
reputation which the first edition of his poems had acquired. 
He arrived in Edinburgh in 1786, and his reception there was 
more like an agreeable change of fortune in a romance than 
like an event in ordinary life. His company was everywhere 
sought for ; and it was soon found that the admiration which his 
poetry had excited was but a part of what was due to the general 
eminence of his mental faculties. His natural eloquence, and 
his warm and social heart expanding under the influence of pros- 
perity — which with all the pride of genius retained a quick and 
versatile sympathy with every variety of human character — made 
him equally fascinating in the most refined and convivial so- 
cieties. For a while he reigned the fashion and idol of his native 
capital. 

The profits of his new edition enabled him in the succeeding 
year, 1787, to make a tour through a considerable extent both 
of the south and north of Scotland, The friend who accom- 
panied him in this excursion gives a very interesting description 
of the impressions which he saw produced in Burns's mind from 
some of the romantic scenery which they visited. " When we 
came," he says, " to a rustic hut on the river Till, where the 
stream descends in a noble waterfall, and is surrounded by a 
woody precipice that commands a most beautiful view of its 
course, he threw himself on a heathy seat, and gave himself up 
to a tender, abstracted, and voluptuous indulgence of imagina- 
tion." It may be conceived with what enthusiasm he visited the 
field of Bannockburn. 

After he had been caressed and distinguished so much in 
* " The gloomy night is gathering fast." 



390 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

Edinburgh, it was natural to anticipate that, among- the many 
individuals of public influence and respectability who had coun- 
tenanced his genius, some means might have been devised to 
secure to him a competent livelihood in a proper station of 
society. It was probably with this hope in his mind that he 
returned to Edinburgh after his summer excursion ; and, unfor- 
tunately for his habits, spent the winter of 1788 in accepting a 
round of convivial invitations. The hospitality of the North was 
not then what it now is. Refinement had not yet banished to the 
tavern the custom of bumper-toasts and of pressing the bottle ; 
and the master of the house was not thought very hospitable 
unless the majority of his male guests at a regular party were 
at least half intoxicated. Burns was invited and importuned to 
those scenes of dissipation ; and beset at least as much by the 
desire of others to enjoy his society when he was exhilarated as 
by his own facility to lend it. He probably deluded his own re- 
flections by imagining that in every fresh excess he was acquiring 
a new friend, or attaching one already acquired. But with all 
the admiration and declarations of personal friendship which 
were lavished on him, the only appointment that could be 
obtained for him was that of an oflRcer of excise. In the mean 
time he had acquired a relish for a new and over-excited state of 
life. He had been expected to shine in every society ; and, to 
use his own phrase, " had been too often obliged to give his 
company a slice of his constitution." At least he was so 
infatuated as to think so. He had now to go back to the sphere 
of society from which he had emerged, with every preparatory 
circumstance to render him discontented with it that the most 
ingenious cruelty could have devised. 

After his appointment to the office of a gauger he took a farm 
at Ellisland, on the banks of the Nith, and settled in conjugal 
union with his Jean. But here his unhappy distraction between 
two employments, and his mode of life as an exciseman, which 
made the public-house his frequent abode, and his fatigues a temp- 
tation to excesses, had so bad an influence on his affairs, that at 
the end of three years and a half he sold his stock and gave up 
his farm. By promotion in the excise his income had risen to 
70/. a-year, and with only this income in immediate prospect he 
repaired to Dumfries, the new place of duty that was assigned to 
him by the board of commissioners. Here his intemperate 



BURNS. 391 



habits became confirmed, and his conduct and conversation grew 
daily more unguarded. Times of political rancour had also 
arrived, in which he was too ardent a spirit to preserve neutrality. 
He took the popular side, and became exposed to charges of dis- 
loyalty. He spurned, indeed, at those charges, and wrote a very 
spirited explanation of his principles. But his political conver- 
sations had been reported to the Board of Excise, and it required 
the interest of a powerful friend to support him in the humble 
situation which he held. It was at Dumfries that he wrote the 
finest of his songs for Thomson's ' Musical Collection,' and dated 
many of the most eloquent of his letters. 

In the winter of 1796 liis constitution, broken by cares, irre- 
gularities, and passions, fell into a rapid decline. The summer 
returned ; but only to shine on his sickness and his grave. In 
July his mind wandered into delirium ; and in the same month a 
fever, on the fourth day of its continuance, closed his life and 
sufferings in his thirty-eighth year. 

Whatever were the faults of Burns, he lived unstained by a 
mean or dishonest action. To have died without debt after sup- 
porting a family on 70/. a-year bespeaks after all but little of 
the spendthrift. That income, on account of his incapacity to 
perform his duty, was even reduced to one-half of its amount at 
the period of his dying sickness ; and humiliating threats of 
punishment, for opinions uttered in the confidence of private con- 
versation, were among the last returns which the government of 
Scotland made to the man vi^hose genius attaches agreeable asso- 
ciations to the name of his country. 

His death seemed to efface the recollection of his faults, and 
of political differences, still harder to be forgotten. All the 
respectable inhabitants of Dumfries attended his funeral, whilst 
the volunteers of the city, and two regiments of native fencibles, 
attended with solemn music, and paid military honours at the 
grave of their illustrious countryman. 

Burns has given an elixir of life to his native dialect. The 
Scottish ' Tarn o' Shanter ' will be read as long as any English 
production of the same century. The impression of his genius 
is deep and universal ; and, viewing him merely as a poet, there 
is scarcely any other regret connected with his name, than that 
his productions, with all their merit, fall short of the talents 
which he possessed. That he never E^^ttempted any great work 



.392 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

of fiction or invention may be partly traced to the cast of his 
genius, and partly to his circumstances and defective education. 
His poetical temperament was that of fitful transports, rather 
than steady inspiration. Whatever he might have written was 
likely to have been fraught with passion. There is always 
enough of interest in life to cherish the feelings of a man of 
genius ; but it requires knowledge to enlarge and enrich his 
invagination. Of that knowledge which unrolls the diversities 
of human manners, adventures, and characters to a poet's study, 
he could have no great share ; although he stamped the little 
treasure which he possessed in the mintage of sovereign genius. 
It has been asserted that he received all the education which is 
requisite for a poet ; he had learned reading, writing, and arith- 
metic, and he had dipped into French and geometry. To a 
poet, it must be owned, the three last of those acquisitions were 
quite superfluous. His education, it is also aflfirmed, was equal 
to Shakspeare's ;* but, without intending to make any com- 
parison between the genius of the two bards, it should be recol- 
lected that Shakspeare lived in an age within the verge of 
chivalry, an age overflowing with chivalrous and romantic read- 
ing ; that he was led by his vocation to have daily recourse to 
that kind of reading; that he dwelt on a spot which gave him 
constant access to it ; and was in habitual intercourse with men 
of genius. Burns, after growing up to manhood under toils 
which exhausted his physical frame, acquired a scanty knowledge 
of modern books, of books tending for the most part to regulate 
the judgment more than to exercise the fancy. In the whole 
tract of Iiis reading there seems to be little that could cherish 
his inventive faculties. One material of poetry he certainly 
possessed, independent of books, in the legendary superstitions 
of his native country. But with all that he tells us of his early 
love of those superstitions, they seem to have come home to hi* 
mind with so many ludicrous associations of vulgar tradition, 
that it may be doubted if he could have turned them to account 
in an elevated work of fiction. Strongly and admirably as he 
paints the supernatural in ' Tam o' Shanter,' yet there, as every- 
where else, he makes it subservient to comic effect. The 
fortuitous wildness and sweetness of his strains may, after all, 

* [Even if Shakspeare's education was as humble as what Farmer sup- 
posed it to have been, it was bgyond Burns's.] 



BURNS. 393 



set aside every regret that he did not attempt more superb and 
regular structures of fancy. He describes, as he says, the senti- 
ments which he saw and felt in himself and his rustic compeers 
around him. His page is a lively image of the contemporary 
life and country from which he sprang. He brings back old 
Scotland to us with all her homefelt endearments, her simple 
customs, her festivities, her sturdy prejudices, and orthodox zeal, 
with a power that excites, alternately, the most tender and 
mirthful sensations. After the full account of his pieces which 
Dr. Currie has given, the English reader can have nothing new 
to learn respecting them.* On one powerfully comic piece Dr. 
Currie has not disserted, namely, * The Holy Fair.' It is enough, 
however, to mention the humour of this production without 
recommending its subject. Burns, indeed, only laughs at the 
abuses of a sacred institution ; but the theme was of unsafe 
approach, and he ought to have avoided it. 

He meets us, in his compositions, undisguisedly as a peasant. 
At the same time his observations go extensively into life, like 
those of a man vi^ho felt the proper dignity of human nature in 
the character of a peasant. The writer of some of the severest 
strictures that ever have been passed upon his poetryf conceives 
that his beauties are considerably defaced by a portion of false 
taste and vulgar sentiment, which adhere to him from his low 
education. That Burns's education, or ratiier the want of it, 
excluded him from much knowledge which might have fostered 
his inventive ingenuity, seems to be clear ; but his circumstances 
cannot be admitted to have communicated vulgarity to the tone 
of his sentiments. They have not the sordid taste of low con- 
dition. It is objected to him that he boasts too much of his 
own independence ; but, in reality, this boast is neither frequent 
nor obtrusive ; and it is in itself the expression of a manly and 

* (Since this was written, much has been done to illustrate the life, 
writings, and genius of Burns ; edition after edition has been called for of 
his works, and memoir after memoir. The Lives by Mr. Lockhart and 
Mr. Allan Cunningham ai'e too well known for eulogy or quotation; the 
vigorous vindicatory tone of the former, and the calm, clear, and earnest 
language of the latter, with the fulness of its information, leave little for 
succeeding writers to say by way of justification or illustration.] 

t Critique on the character of Burns in ' The Edinburgh Eeview.' Ar- 
ticle, Cromek's ReLiques of Burns. [By Lord Jeffrey. Mr. Campbell's reply 
to Lord Jeffrey is thought by the Edinburgh Reviewer to be substantially 
successful. See 'Edinburgh Review/ vol. xxxi. p. 492.] 



394 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

laudable feeling. So far from calling up disagreeable recollec- 
tions of rusticity, his sentiments triumph, by their natural energy, 
over those false and fastidious distinctions which the mind is but 
too apt to form in allotting its sympathies to the sensibilities of 
the rich and poor. He carries us into the humble scenes of life, 
not to make us dole out our tribute of charitable compassion to 
paupers and cottagers, but to make us feel with them on equal 
terms, to make us enter into their passions and interests, and 
share our hearts with them as with brothers and sisters of the 
human species. 

He is taxed, in the same place, with perpetually affecting to 
deride the virtues of prudence, regularity, and decency; and 
with being imbued with the sentimentality of German novels. 
Anything more remote from German sentiment than Burns's 
poetry could not easily be mentioned. But is he depraved and 
licentious in a comprehensive view of the moral character of his 
pieces ? The over-genial freedom of a few assuredly ought not 
to fix this character upon the whole of them. It is a charge 
which we should hardly expect to see preferred against the author 
of ' The Cotter's Saturday Night.' He is the enemy, indeed, 
of that selfish and niggardly spirit which shelters itself under 
the name of prudence; but that pharisaical disposition has 
seldom been a favourite with poets. Nor should his maxims, 
which inculcate charity and candour in judging of human 
frailties, be interpreted as a serious defence of them, as when 
he says, 

" Then gently scan your brother man, 
Still gentlier sister woman, 
Though they may gang a kennin wrang ; 
To step aside is human. 

" Who made the heart, 'tis He alone 
Decidedly can try us ; 
He knows each chord, its various tone, 
Each spring, its various bias." 

It is still more surprising that a critic, capable of so eloquently 
developing the traits of Burns's genius, should have found fault 
Math his amatory strains for want of polish, and " of that chival- 
rous tone of gallantry which uniformly abases itself in the 
presence of the object of its devotion." Every reader must 
recall abundance of thoughts in his love-songs, to which any 
attempt to superadd a tone of gallantry would not be 



MASON. 395 



" To gild refined gold, to paint the rose, 
Or add fresh perfume to the violet ;"* 

but to debase the metal, and to take the odour and colour from 
the flower. It is exactly this superiority to " abasement " and 
polish which is the charm that distinguishes Burns from the herd 
of erotic songsters, from the days of the troubadours to the 
present time. He wrote from impulses more sincere than the 
spirit of cliivalry ; and even Lord Surrey and Sir Philip Sidney 
are cold and uninteresting lovers in comparison with the rustic 
Burns. 

The praises of his best pieces I have abstained from re-echoing, 
as there is no epithet of admiration which they deserve which has 
not been bestowed upon them. One point must be conceded to 
the strictures on his poetry to which I have already alluded, — 
that his personal satire was fierce and acrimonious. I am not, 
however, disposed to consider his attacks on Rumble John and 
Holy Willie as destitute of wit ; and his poem on the clerical 
settlements at Kilmarnock blends a good deal of ingenious meta- 
phor with his accustomed humour. Even viewing him as a 
satirist, the last and humblest light in which he can be regarded 
as a poet, it may still be said of him, 

" His style was witty, though it had some gall ; 
Something he might have mended — so may all." 



WILLIAM MASON. 

[Bom, 1725. Died, 1797.] 
William Mason was the son of the vicar of St. Trinity, in the 
East Riding of Yorkshire. He was entered of St. John's Col- 
lege, Cambridge, in his eighteenth year, having already, as he 
informs us, blended some attention to painting and poetry with 
his youthful studies : — 

" Soon my hand the mimic colours spread, 

And vainly strove to snatch a double -wreath 
X^- From Fame's unfading laurels." — English Garden, b. i. 

At the university he distinguished himself by his Monody on 

* [This version by no means improves the original, which is as follows : — 
911 ' 

To gild refined gold, to paint the /i7y, 

^^' To throw a perfume on the violet. 

King John, act iv. scene ii. 
A great poet quoting another should be correct. — Byron, Works, vol. xvi. 
p. 124,] 



396 LIVES OF THE POETS, 

the death of Pope, which was published in 1747.* Two years 
afterwards he obtained his degree of master of arts, and a fellow- 
ship of Pembroke Hall. For his fellowship he was indebted to 
the interest of Gray, whose acquaintance with him was intimate 
and lasting, and who describes him, at Cambridge, as a young 
man of much fancy, little judgment, and a good deal of modesty ; 
in simplicity a child, a little vain, but sincere, inoffensive, and 
indolent. At a later period of his life, Thomas Warton gave 
him the very opposite character of a " buckram manr 

He was early attached to Whig principles, and wrote his poem 
of ' Isis,' as an attack on the Jacobitism of Oxford. When 
Thomas Warton produced his ' Triumph of Isis,' in reply, the 
two poets had the liberality to compliment the productions of 
each other ; nor were their rival strains much worthy of mutual 
envy. But Mason, though he was above envy, could not detach 
his vanity from the subject. One evening, on entering Oxford 
with a friend, he expressed his happiness that it was dark. His 
friend not perceiving any advantage in the circumstance, 
" What !" said Mason, " don't you remember my ' Isis'? " 

In 1753 he published his ' Elfrida,' in which the chorus is 
introduced after the model of the Greek drama. The general 
unsuitableness of that venerable appendage of the ancient theatre 
for the modern stage seems to be little disputed. f The two pre- 
dominent features of the Greek chorus were, its music and its ab- 
stract morality. Its musical character could not be revived, unless 
the science of music were by some miracle to be made a thousand 
years younger, and unless modern ears were restored to a taste 
for its youthful simplicity. If music were as freely mixed with 
our tragedy as with that of Greece, the effect would speedily be, 
to make harmony predominate over words, sound over sense, as 

* [In one of his first poems Mason had, in a puerile fiction, ranked Chau- 
cer and Spenser and Milton below Pope, which is like comparing a garden 
shrub with the oaks of the forest. But he would have maintained no such 
absurdity in his riper years, for Mason lived to perceive and correct both 
his errors of opinion and his faults of style.— So uthey, Cotcper, vol. ii. 
p. 177.1 

t [The ancients were perpetually confined and hampered by the necessity 
of using the chorus : and if they have done wouders notwithstanding this 
clog, sure I am they would have performed still greater wonders without it. 
—Gray. Remarks on ' Elfrida.' Works by MitforJ, vol. iv. p. 2. 

It is impossible to conceive that Phsedra trusted her incestuous passion, or 
Medea her murderous revenge, to a whole troop of attendants. — Hor. Wal- 
pole. Hoi/al and JSohle Authors.'] 



MASON. 397 



in modern operas, and the result would be, not a resemblance to 
the drama of Greece, but a thing as opposite to it as possible. 
The moral use of the ancient chorus is also superseded by the 
nature of modern dramatic imitation, which incorporates senti- 
ment and reflection so freely with the speeches of the represented 
characters as to need no suspension of the dialogue for the sake 
of lyrical bursts of morality or religious invocation. 

The chorus was the oldest part of Greek tragedy ; and though 
Mr. Schlegel has rejected the idea of its having owed its pre- 
servation on the Greek stage to its antiquity, I cannot help 
thinking that that circumstance was partly the cause of its pre- 
servation.* Certainly the Greek drama, having sprung from a 
choral origin, would always retain a character congenial with 
the chorus. The Greek drama preserved a religious and highly 
rhythmical character. It took its rise from a popular solemnity, 
and continued to exhibit the public, as it were, personified in a 
distinct character upon the stage. In this circumstance we may 
perhaps recognise a trait of the democratic spirit of Athenian 
manners, which delighted to give the impartial spectators a sort 
of image and representative voice upon the stage. Music was 
then simple ; the dramatic representation of character and action, 
though bold, was simple ; and this simplicity left on the ancient 
stage a space for the chorus, which it could not obtain (perma- 
nently) on that of the moderns. Our music is so complicated, 
that when it is allied with words it overwhelms our attention to 
words. Again, the Greek drama gave strong and decisive out- 
lines of character and passion, but not their minute shadings ; 
our drama gives all the play of moral physiognomy. The great 
and awful characters of a Greek tragedy spoke in pithy texts, 
without commentaries of sentiment ; while the flexible eloquence 
of the moderns supplies both text and commentary. Every 
moral feeling, calm or tumultuous, is expressed in our soliloquies 

* Mr. Schlegel alludes to the tradition of Sophocles having written a 
prose defence of the chorus against the objections of contemporaries who 
blamed his continuance of it. Admitting this tradition, what does it prove ? 
Sophocles found the chorus in his native drama, and no doubt found the 
genius of that drama congenial with the chorus from which it had sprung. 
In the opinion of the great German critic, he used the chorus, not from 
regard to habit, but principle. But have not many persons of the highest 
genius defended customs on the score of pi'inciple, to which they were 
secretly, perhaps unconsciously, attached from the power of habit ? Cus- 
tom is, in fact, stronger than principle. 



398 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

or dialogues. The Greeks made up for the want of soliloquy, 
and for the short simplicity of their dialogue, which often con- 
sisted in interchanges of single lines, by choral speeches, which 
commented on the passing action, explained occurring motives, 
and soothed or deepened the moral impressions arising out of 
the piece. With us everything is different. The dramatic cha- 
racter is brought, both physically and morally, so much nearer 
to our perception, with all its fluctuating motives and feelings, as 
to render it as unnecessary to have interpreters of sentiment or 
motives, such as the chorus, to magnify, or soothe, or prolong 
our moral impressions, as to have buskins to increase the size, or 
brazen vases to reverberate the voice, of the speaker. Nor has 
the mind any preparation for such juries of reflectors, and pro- 
cessions of confidential advisers. 

There is, however, no rule without a possible exception. To 
make the chorus an habitual part of the modern drama would be 
a chimerical attempt. There are few subjects in which every 
part of a plot may not be fulfilled by individuals. Yet it is 
easy to conceive a subject in which it may be required, or at 
least desirable, to incorporate a group of individuals under one 
common part. And where this grouping shall arise, not capri- 
ciously, but necessarily out of the nature of the subject, our 
minds will not be offended by the circumstance, but will thank 
the dramatist for an agreeable novelty. In order to reconcile us, 
however, to this plural personage, or chorus, it is necessary that 
the individuals composing it should be knit not only by a natural 
but dignified coalition. The group, in fact, will scarcely please 
or interest the imagination unless it has a solemn or interesting 
community of character. Such are the Druids in ' Caractacus ;' 
and, perhaps, the chorus of Israelites in Racine's ' Esther.' In 
such a case even a modern audience would be likely to suspend 
their love of artificial harmony, and to listen with delight to 
simple music and choral poetry, where the words were not 
drowned in the music. At all events, there would exist a fair 
apology for introducing a chorus, from the natural and imposing 
bond of unity belonging to the group. But this apology will by 
no means apply to the tragedy of ' Elfrida.' The chorus is there 
composed of persons who have no other community of character 
than their being ^the waiting-women of a baroness. They are 
too unimportant personages to be a chorus. They have no right 



MASON. 399 



to form so important a ring around Elfrida in the dramatic 
hemisphere ; and the imagination is puzzled to discover any pro- 
priety in those young ladies, who, according to history, ought to 
have been good Christians, striking up a hymn, in Harewood 
Forest, to the rising sun : — 

" Hail to the living light," &c. 

In other respects the tragedy of ' Elfrida' is objectionable. It 
violates the traditional truth of history, without exhibiting a story 
sufficiently powerful to triumph over our historical belief. The 
whole concludes with Elfrida's self-devotion to widowhood ; but 
no circumstance is contrived to assure us, that, like many other 
afflicted widows, she may not marry again. An irreverend and 
ludicrous, but involuntary, recollection is apt to cross the mind 
respecting the fragility of widows' vows — 

" Vows made in pain, as violent and void." 
* Elfrida' was acted at Covent-garden in 1772 under the direc- 
tion of Colman, who got it up with splendid scenery, and cha- 
racteristic music composed by Dr. Arne ; but he made some 
alterations in the text, which violently offended its author. 
Mason threatened the manager with an appeal to the public ; and 
the manager, in turn, threatened the poet with introducing a 
chorus of Grecian washerwomen on the stage. At the distance 
of several years it was revived at the same theatre, with the 
author's own alterations, but with no better success. The play, 
in spite of its theatrical failure, was still acknowledged to possess 
poetical beauties.* 

In 1754 Mason went into orders, and, through the patronage 
of Lord Holdernesse, was appointed one of the chaplains to the 
King. He was also domestic chaplain to the nobleman now 
mentioned, and accompanied him to Germany, where he speaks 
of having met with his friend Whitehead, the future laureate, at 
Hanover, in the year 1755. About the same time he received 

* [It was something in that sickly age of tragedy to produce two such 
dramas as ' Elfrida ' and * Caractacus ;' the success of which, when Colman 
\?(much to his honour) made the bold experiment of bringing them on the 
stage, proved that, although the public had long been dieted upon trash, they 
could relish something of a worthier kind than ' Tamerlane,' ' The Revenge,' 
and ' The Grecian Daughter.' Mason composed his plays upon an artificial 
paodel, and in a gorgeous diction, because he thought Shakspeare had pre- 
cluded all hope of excellence in any other form of drama. Southey, Cow- 
per, vol. ii. p. 177.] 



400 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

the living of Aston. He again courted the attention of the 
public in 1756, with four Odes, the themes of which were ' Inde- 
pendence,' ' Memory,' ' Melancholy,' and * The Fall of Tyranny.' 
Smollett and Shenstone, in their strains to ' Independence' and 
* Memory,' have certainly outshone our poet, as well as anticipated 
him in those subjects. The glittering and alliterative style of 
those four Odes of Mason was severely parodied by Lloyd and 
Colman ; and the public, it is said, were more entertained with 
the parodies than with the originals. On the death of Gibber 
he was proposed to succeed to the laurel ; but he received an 
apology for its not being offered to him because he was a clergy- 
man. The apology was certainly both an absurd and false one ; 
for Warton, the succeeding laureate, was in orders.* There 
seems, however, to be no room for doubting the sincerity of 
Mason's declaration, that he was indifferent about the office. 

Llis reputation was considerably raised by the appearance of 
' Caractacus ' in 1759. Many years after its publica.tion it was 
performed at Covent-garden with applause ; though the impres- 
sion it produced was not sufficient to make it permanent on the 
stao-e. This chef-d'ceuvre of Mason may not exhibit strong or 
minute delineation of human cliaracter ; but it has enough of 
dramatic interest to support our admiration of virtue and our 
suspense and emotion in behalf of its cause ; and it leads the 
imagination into scenes delightfully cast amidst the awfulness of 
superstition, the venerable antiquity of history, and the untamed 
grandeur of external nature. In this last respect it may be pre- 
ferred to the tragedy of Beaumont and Fletcher on the same 
subject — that it brings forward the persons and abodes of the 
Druids with more magnificent effect. There is so much of the 
poet's eye displayed in the choice of his ground and in the out- 
line of his structure, that Mason seems to challenge something 
like a generous prepossession of the mind in judging of his drama. 

* [This is far from correct. Whitehead succeeded Gibber, who -was suc- 
ceeded by Warton. Wiiitehead was not in orders ; but Eusden. a parson, 
and a drunken one, had worn the laurel. Ma^on, being in orders, was 
thought b)' the then Lord Chamberlain less eligible than a layman. 

Dryden was the last laureate appointed by the King; the successors of 
Charles IL, with a noble regard for poetry, left the election to the Lord 
Chamberlain. To Gray and Sir Walter Scott the situation was offered as a 
sinecure, but refused, and by Mr. Southey was accepted conditionally— not 
to sing annually, but upon occasion, that is, when the subject was fit for song 
and tiie Muse consenting.] 



MASON. 401 



It is the work of a man of genius, that calls for regret on its 

imperfections. Even in the lyrical passages, which are most of 

all loaded with superfluous ornament and alliteration, we meet 

with an enthusiasm that breaks out from amidst encumbering 

faults. The invocation of the Druids to Snowdon, for which 

the mind is so well prepared by the preceding scene, begins 

with peculiar harmony : — 

" Mona on Snowdon calls : 
Hear, thou king of mountains, hear !" — 

and the ode on which Gray bestowed so much approbation 
opens with a noble personification and an impetuous spirit : — 

*' Hark ! heard ye not yon footstep dread, 
That shook the earth with thundering tread ? 
'Twas Death. In haste the warrior pass'd, 
High tower'd his helmed head." 

In 1764 he published a collection of his works in one volume, 
containing four Elegies, which had been written since the 
appearance of ' Caractacus.' The language of those elegies is 
certainly less stiffly embroidered than that of his odes ; and they 
contain some agreeable passages, such as Dry den's character in 
the first, the description of a friend's happiness in country 
retirement in the second, and of Lady Coventry's beauty in the 
fourth ; but they are not altogether free from the " buckram,'^ 
and are studies of the head more than the heart. 

In 1762 he was appointed by his friend Mr. Montagu to the 
canonry and prebend of Driffield, in the cathedral of York, and 
by Lord Holdernesse to the precentorship of the church ; but 
his principal residence continued still to be at Aston, where he 
indulged his taste in adorning the grounds near his parsonage, 
and was still more honourably distinguished by an exemplary 
fulfilment of his clerical duties. In 1765 he married a Miss 
Sherman, the daughter of "William Sherman, Esq., of Kingston- 
upon-Hull. From the time of his marriage with this amiable 
woman he had unhappily little intermission from anxiety in 
watching the progress of a consumption which carried her off at 
the end of two years at the early age of twenty-eight. He has 
commemorated her virtues in a well-known and elegant sepul- 
chral inscription. 

By the death of his beloved friend Gray, he was left a legacy 
of 500/., together with the books and MSS. of the poet. His 

2 D 



402 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

* Memoirs and Letters of Gray ' were published in 1775, upon a 

new plan of biography, which has since been followed in several 

instances.* The first book of his ' English Garden * made its 

appearance in 1772 ; the three subsequent parts came out in 

1777, 1779, and 1782. The first book contains a few lines 

beautifully descriptive of woodland scenery : — 

" Many a glade is found, 
The haunt of wood-gods only ; where if Art 
E'er dared to tread, 'twas with unsandall'd foot, 
Printless, as if the place were holy ground." 

There may be other fine passages in this poem ; but if there be 
I confess that the somniferous effect of the whole has occasioned 
to me the fault or misfortune of overlooking them. What value 
it may possess as an " Art of Ornamental Gardening," I do not 
presume to judge ; but if this be the perfection of didactic 
poetry, as Warton pronounced it, it would seem to be as difficult 
to teach art by poetry, as to teach poetry by art. He begins the 
poem by invoking Simplicity ; but she never comes. Had her 
power condescended to visit him, I think she would have thrown 
a less ^^ dilettante'^ air upon his principal episode, in which the 
tragic event of a woman expiring suddenly of a broken heart is 
introduced by a conversation between her rival lovers about 
" Palladian bridges, Panini's pencil, and Piranesi's hand." At 
all events, Simplicity would not have allowed the hero of the 
story to construct his barns in imitation of a Norman fortress, 
and to give his dairy the resemblance of an ancient abbey ; nor 
the poet himself to address a flock of sheep with as much 
solemnity as if he had been haranguing a senate. 

During the whole progress of the American war. Mason con- 
tinued unchanged in his Whig principles, and took an active 
share in the association for parliamentary reform, which began 
to be formed in the year 1779. Finding that his principles gave 
offence at court, he resigned his office of chaplainship to the 
King. His Muse was indebted to those politics for a new and 
lively change in her character. In the pieces which he wrote 

* [Instead of melting down my materials into one mass, and constantly 
speaking in my own person, by which I might have appeared to have more 
merit in the execution of the work, I have resolved to adopt and enlarge 
upon the excellent plan of INIr. Mason in his Memoirs of Gray. — Boswell. 

Mason's plan has been further honoured by Hayley's imitation of it in his 
Life of Cowper, by Mr. Moore in his Life of Lord Byron, and by Mr, Lock- 
hart in his Life of Sir Walter Scott.} 



MASON. 403 



under the name of Malcolm MacGregor there is a pleasantry 
that we should little expect from the solemn hand which had 
touched the harp of the Druids. Thomas Warton was the first 
to discover, or at least to announce, him as the author of the 
' Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers ;' and Mason's ex- 
planation left the suspicion uncontradicted.* 

Among his accomplishments his critical knowledge of painting 
must have been considerable, for his translation of Du Fresnoy's 
poem on that art, which appeared in 1783, was finished at the 
particular suggestion of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who furnished it 
with illustrative notes. One of his last publications was ' An 
Ode on the Commemoration of the British Revolution.' It was 
his very last song in praise of liberty. Had Soame Jenyns, 
whom our poet rallies so facetiously for his Toryism, lived to 
read his palinode after the French Revolution, he might have 
retorted on him the lines which Mason put in the mouth of 
Dean Tucker in his ' Dialogue of the Dean and the Squire :' — 

" Squire Jenyns, since with like intent 
We both have writ on government." 

But he showed that his philanthropy had suflfered no abatement 
from the change of his politics, by delivering and publishing an 
eloquent sermon against the slave-trade. In the same year that 
gave occasion to his ' Secular Ode ' he condescended to be the 
biographer of his friend Whitehead, and the editor of his works. 

Mason's learning in the arts was of no ordinary kind. He 
composed several devotional pieces of music for the choir of 
York cathedral ; and Dr. Burney speaks of an ' Historical and 
Critical Essay on English Church Music,' which he published 
in 1795, in very respectful terms. It is singular, however, that 
the fault ascribed by the same authority to his musical theory 
should be that of Calvinistical plainness. In verse he was my 
Lord Peter — in his taste for sacred music Dr. Burney compares 
him to Jack — in the ' Tale of a Tub.' 

His death was occasioned, in his seventy-second year, by an 
accidental hurt on his leg, which he received in stepping out of 
a carriage, and which produced an incurable mortification. 

* [Mason's right to the poem is now put beyond all question by the col- 
lected edition of Walpole's Letters,] 

2d2 



404 LIVES OF THE POETS, 



JOSEPH WARTON. 

[Born, 1722. Died, 1800.] 

Doctor Joseph Warton, son to the vicar of Basingstoke, and 
elder brother to the historian of English poetry, was born in the 
house of his maternal grandfather, the Rev. Joseph Richardson, 
rector of Dunsfold, in Surrey. He Mas chiefly educated at 
home by his father, Dr. "Warton, till his fourteenth year, when 
he was admitted on the foundation of Winchester College. He 
was there the schoolfellow and intimate of Collins, the poet ; 
and, in conjunction with him and another youth, whose name 
was Tomkyns, he sent to * The Gentleman's Magazine * three 
pieces of poetry, which were highly commended in that miscel- 
lany. In 1740, being superannuated, he left Winchester School, 
and having missed a presentation to New College, Oxford, was 
entered a commoner at that of Oriel. At the university he com- 
posed his two poems, ' The Enthusiast ' and ' The Dying Indian,' 
and a satirical prose sketch, in imitation of Le Sage, entitled 
* Ranelagh,' which his editor, Mr. Wooll, has inserted in the 
volume that contains his life, letters, and poems. Having taken 
the degree of bachelor of arts at Oxford in 1744, he was 
ordained on his father's curacy at Basingstoke. At the end of 
two years he removed from thence to do duty at Chelsea, where 
he caught the small-pox. Having left that place for change of 
air, he did not return to it, on account of some disagreement 
with the parishioners, but officiated for a few months at Chawton 
and Droxford, and then resumed his residence at Basingstoke. 
In the same year, 1746, he published a volume of his odes, in 
the preface to which he expressed a hope that they would be 
regarded as a fair attempt to bring poetry back from the mo- 
ralizing and didactic taste of the age, to the truer channels of 
fancy and description. Collins, our author's immortal contem- 
porary, also published his odes in the same month of the same 
year. He realised, with the hand of genius, that idea of highly 
personified and picturesque composition which Warton contem- 
plated with the eye of taste. But Collins's works were ushered 
in with no manifesto of a design to regenerate the taste of the 
age, with no pretensions of erecting a new or recovered standard 
of excellence. 



JOSEPH WARTON. 405 



In 1748 our author was presented by the Duke of Bolton to 
the rectory of Winslade, when he immediately married a lady of 
that neighbourhood, Miss Daman, to whom he had been for 
some time attached. He had not been long settled in his living 
when he was invited by his patron to accompany him to the 
south of France. The Duchess of Bolton was then in a con- 
firmed dropsy, and his Grace, anticipating her death, wished to 
have a Protestant clergyman with him on the Continent, who 
might marry him, on the first intelligence of his consort's death, 
to the lady with whom he lived, and who was universally known 
by the name of Polly Peachum. Dr. Warton complied with 
this proposal, to which (as his circumstances were narrow) it 
must be hoped that his poverty consented rather than his will. 
" To those," says Mr. Wool], " who have enjoyed the rich and 
varied treasures of Dr. Warton's conversation, who have been 
dazzled by the brilliancy of his wit, and instructed by the acute- 
ness of his understanding, I need not suggest how truly enviable 
was the journey which his fellow-travellers accomplished through 
the French provinces to Montauban." It may be doubted, 
however, if the French provinces were exactly the scene where 
his fellow-travellers were most likely to be instructed by the 
acuteness of Dr. Warton's observations, as he was unable to 
speak the language of the country, and could have no informa- 
tion from foreigners, except what he could now and then extort 
from the barbarous Latin of some Irish friar. He was himself 
so far from being delighted or edified by his pilgrimage, that for 
private reasons (as his biographer states), and from impatience 
of being restored to his family, he returned home without 
having accomplished the object for which the Duke had taken 
him abroad. He set out for Bordeaux in a courier's cart ; but 
being dreadfully jolted in that vehicle, he quitted it, and, having 
joined some carriers in Brittany, came home by way of St. 
Haloes. A month after his return to England the Duchess of 
Bolton died ; and our author, imagining that his patron would 
possibly have the decency lo remain a widower for a few weeks, 
wrote to his Grace, offering to join him immediately. But the 
Duke had no mind to delay his nuptials ; he was joined to Polly 
by a Protestant clergyman who was found upon the spot ; and 
our author thus missed the reward of the only action of his life 
which can be said to throw a blemish on his respectable memory. 



406 LIVES OF THE POETS, 

In the year 1748-9 he had begun, and in 1753 he finished and 
published, an edition of Virgil in English and Latin. To this 
work Warburton contributed a dissertation on the sixth book of 
* The ^neid ;' Atterbury furnished a commentary on the cha- 
racter of lapis ; and the laureate, Whitehead, another on the 
shield of ^neas. Many of the notes were taken from the best 
commentators on Virgil, particularly Catrou and Segrais ; some 
were supplied by Mr. Spence ; and others, relating to the soil, 
climate, and customs of Italy, by Mr. Holdsworth, who had re- 
sided for many years in that countr}\ For the English of ' The 
-^neid ' he adopted the translation by Pitt. The Life of Virgil, 
with three essays on pastoral,* didactic, and epic poetry, and a 
poetical version of the Eclogues and Georgics, constituted his 
own part of the work. This translation may, in many instances, 
be found more faithful and concise than Dryden's ; but it wants 
that elastic and idiomatic freedom by which Dryden reconciles 
us to his faults, and exhibits rather the diligence of a scholar 
than the spirit of a poet. Dr. Harewood, in his view of the 
classics, accuses the Latin text of incorrectness. t Shortly after 
the appearance of his ' Virgil ' he took a share in the periodical 
paper ' The Adventurer,' and contributed twenty-four numbers, 
which have been generally esteemed the most valuable in the work. 

In 1754 he was instituted to the living of Tun worth, on the 
presentation of the Jervoise family, and in 1755 was elected 
second master of Winchester School, with the management and 
advantage of a boarding-house. In the following year Lord 
Ly ttelton, who had submitted a part of his ' Historj' of Henry IL' 
to his revisal, bestowed a scarf upon him. He found leisure at 
this period to commence his ' Essay on the Writings and Genius 
of Pope,' which he dedicated to Young without subscribing his 
name. But he was soon, and it would appear with his own tacit 

* His reflections on pastoi-al poetry are limited to a few sentences ; but 
he subjoins an essay on the subject, by Dr. Johnson, from * The Rambler." 

t With -what justice I will not pretend to say ; but after comparing a few 
pages of his edition with Maittaire, he seems to me to be less attentive to 
punctuation than the editor of the ' Corpus Poetarum,' and sometimes to 
omit ihe marks by which it is customary to distiugmsh adverbs from pro- 
nouns. I dislike his interpretation of one line in the first Eclogue of Virgil, 
which seems to me peculiarly tasteless ; namely, where he translates " Post 
aliquot aristas" "after a few years." The picture of Meliboeus"s cottage 
" behind a few ears of corn," so simply and exquisitely touched, is thus ex- 
changed for a forced phrase with regard to time. 



JOSEPH WARTON. 407 



permission, generally pronounced to be its author. Twenty-six 
years, however, elapsed before he ventured to complete it. Dr. 
Johnson said that this was owing to his not having been able to 
bring the public to be of his opinion as to Pope. Another 
reason has been assigned for his inactivity.* Warburton, the 
guardian of Pope's fame, was still alive ; and he was the zealous 
and useful friend of our author's brother. The prelate died in 
1779, and in 1782 Dr. Warton published his extended and 
finished Essay. If the supposition that he abstained from em- 
broiling himself by the question about Pope with Warburton be 
true, it will at least impress us with an idea of his patience ; for 
it was no secret that RufFhead was supplied by Warburton with 
materials for a Life of Pope, in which he attacked Dr. Warton 
with abundant severity, but in which he entangled himself more 
than his adversary in the coarse-spun ropes of his special plead- 
ing. The Essay for a time raised up to him another enemy, to 
whom his conduct has even an air of submissiveness. In com- 
menting on a line of Pope, he hazarded a remark on Hogarth's 
propensity to intermix the ludicrous with attempts at the sub- 
lime. Hogarth revengefully introduced Dr. Warton's works 
into one of his satirical pieces, and vowed to bear him eternal 
enmity. Their mutual friends, however, interfered, and the 
artist was pacified. Dr. Warton, in the next edition, altered his 
just animadversion on Hogarth into an ill-merited compliment. 

By delaying to republish his Essay on Pope, he ultimately 
obtained a more dispassionate hearing from the public for the 
work in its finished state. In the mean time he enriched it with 
additions, digested from the reading of half a lifetime. The 
author of * The Pursuits of Literature ' has pronounced it a 
commonplace book ; and Richardson, the novelist, used to call 
it a literary gossip : but a testimony in its favour, of more 
authority than any individual opinion, will be found in the popu- 
larity with which it continues to be read. It is very entertaining, 
and abounds with criticism of more research than Addison's, of 
more amenity than Hurd's or Warburton's, and of more insinu- 
ating tact than Johnson's, At the same time, while much 
ingenuity and many truths are scattered over the' Essay, it is 
impossible to admire it as an entire theory, solid and consistent in 
all its parts. It is certainly setting out from unfortunate pre- 
* Chalmers's Life of J. Warton, ' British Poets.' 



408 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

raises to begin his Remarks on Pope with grouping Dryden and 
Addison in the same class of poets, and to form a scale for esti- 
mating poetical genius which would set Elijah Fenton in a 
higher sphere than Butler. He places Pcpe in the scale of our 
poets next to Milton, and above Dryden ; yet he applies to him 
the exact character which Voltaire gives to the heartless Boileau 
— that of a writer " perhaps incapable of the sublime which 
elevates, or of the feeling which affects the soul." With all tliis 
he tells us that our poetry and our language are everlastingly 
indebted to Pope : he attributes genuine tenderness to the ' Elegy 
on an Unfortunate Lady ;' a strong degree of passion to the 
' Epistle of Eloise ;' invention and fancy to ' The Rape of the 
Lock ;' and a picturesque conception to some parts of ' Windsor 
Forest,' which he pronounces worthy of the pencil of Rubens or 
Julio Romano. There is something like April weather in these 
transitions. 

In May 1766 he was advanced to the head-mastership of 
Winchester School. In consequence of this promotion he once 
more visited Oxford, and proceeded to the degree of bachelor 
and doctor in divinity. After a union of twenty years he lost 
his first wife, by whom he had six children ; but his family and 
his professional situation requiring a domestic partner, he had 
been only a year a widower when he married a Miss Nicholas, of 
Winchester. 

He now visited London more frequently than before. The 
circle of his friends in the metropolis comprehended all the 
members of Burke's and Johnson's Literarj^ Club. With John- 
son himself he was for a long time on intimate terms ; but their 
friendship suffered a breach which was never closed in conse- 
quence of an argument which took place between them during 
an evening spent at the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The 
concluding words of their conversation are reported by one who 
was present to have been these : Johnson said, " Sir, I am not 
accustomed to be contradicted." Warton replied, " Better, sir, 
for yourself and your friends, if you were: our respect could not 
be increased, but our love might." 

In 1782 he was indebted to his friend, Dr. Lowth, Bishop of 
London, for a prebend of St. Paul's, and the living of Thorley 
in Hertfordshire, which, after some arrangements, he exchanged 
for that of Wickham. His ecclesiastical preferments came too 



JOSEPH WARTON. 409 



late in life to place him in that state of leisure and independ- 
ence which might have enabled him to devote his best years to 
literature, instead of the drudgery of a school. One great pro- 
ject which he announced, but never fulfilled, namely, * A Greneral 
History of Learning,' was in all probability prevented by the 
pressure of his daily occupations. In 1788, through the interest 
of Lord Shannon, he obtained a prebend of AVinche'ster, and, 
tlirough the interest of Lord Malmsbury, was appointed to the 
rectory of Euston, which he was afterwards allowed to exchange 
for that of Upham. In 1793 he resigned the fatigues of his 
mastership of Winchester ; and having received from the super- 
intendents of the institution a vote of well-earned thanks for 
his long and meritorious services, he went to live at his rectory 
of Wickham. 

During his retirement at that place he was induced by a 
liberal offer of the booksellers to superintend an edition of 
Pope, which he published in 1797. It was objected to this 
edition that it contained only his Essay on Pope, cut down into 
notes ; his biographer, however, repels the objection, by alleging 
that it contains a considerable portion of new matter. In his 
zeal to present everything that could be traced to the pen of 
Pope, he introduced two pieces of indelicate humour, 'The 
Double Mistress,' and the second satire of Horace. For the 
insertion of those pieces he received a censure in / The Pur- 
suits of Literature,' which, considering his grey hairs and ser- 
vices in the literary world, was unbecoming, and which my 
individual partiality for Mr. Matthias ^akes me wish that I 
had not to record. 

As a critic Dr. Warton is distinguished by his love of the 
fanciful and romantic. He examined our poetry at a period 
when it appeared to him that versified observations on familiar 
life and manners had usurped the honours which were exclu- 
sively due to the bold and inventive powers of imagination. 
He conceived, also, that the charm of description in poetry was 
not sufficiently appreciated ^in his own day : not that the age 
could be said to be without descriptive writers, but because, as 
he apprehended, the tyranny of Pope's reputation had placed 
moral and didactic verse in too pre-eminent a light. He there- 
fore strongly urged the principle " that the most solid observa- 
tions on life, expressed with the utmost brevity and elegance, 



410 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

are morality, and not poetry."* Without examining how far 
this principle applies exactly to the character of Pope, whom he 
himself owns not to have been without pathos and imagination, 
I think his proposition is so worded as to be liable to lead to a 
most unsound distinction between morality and poetry. If by 
"the most solid observations on life" are meant only those 
which relate to its prudential management and plain concerns, 
it is certainly true that these cannot be made poetical by the 
utmost brevity or elegance of expression. It is also true that 
even the nobler tenets of morality are comparatively less inte- 
resting in an insulated and didactic shape than when they are 
blended with strong imitations of life, where passion, character, 
and situation bring them deeply home to our attention. Fiction 
is on this account so far the soul of poetry, that, without its aid 
as a vehicle, poetry can only give us morality in an abstract and 
(comparatively) uninteresting sliape. But why does Fiction 
please us ? surely not because it is false, but because it seems to 
be true ; because it spreads a wider field and a more brilliant 
crowd of objects to our moral perceptions than Reality affords. 
Morality (in a high sense of the term, and not speaking of it as 
a dry science) is the essence of poetry. We fly from the injustice 
of this world to the poetical justice of Fiction, where our sense 
of right and wrong is either satisfied, or where our sympathy at 
least reposes with less disappointment and distraction ^than on 
the characters of life itself. Fiction, we may indeed be told, 

* [Our English poets may, I thiuk, be disposed in four different classes 
and degrees. In the first class I would place our only three sublime and 
pathetic poets, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton. In the second class should be 
ranked such as possessed the true poetical genius in a more moderate 
degree, but who had noble talents for moral, ethical, and panegyrical poesy. 
At the head of these are Dryden, Prior, Addison, Cowley, Waller, Garth, 
Feuton, Gay, Denham, Paruell. In the third class may be placed men of 
•wit, of elegant taste, and lively fancy in describing familiar life, though not 
the higher scenes of poetry. Here may be numbered, Butler, Swift, 
Eochester, Donne, Dorset, Oldham. In the fourth class, the mere versifiers, 
however smooth and mellifluous some of them may be thought, should be 
disposed ; such as Pitt, Sandys, Fairfax, Broome, Buckingham, Lansdowne. 
This enumeration is not intended as a complete catalogue of writers, but 
only to mark out briefly the different species of our celebrated authors. In 
which of these classes Pope deserves to be placed, the following work is 
intended to determine. — Joseph Warton, Dedication to Dr. Young. 

The position of Pope among our poets, and the question generally of clas- 
sification, Mr. Campbell has argued at some length in the Introductory 
Essay to this volume.] 



COWPER. 411 



carries us into "a world of gayer tinct and gruce^'' the laws of 
which are not to be judged by solid observations on the real 
world. 

But this is not the case, for moral truth is still the light of 
poetry, and fiction is only the refracting atmosphere which dif- 
fuses it ; and the laws of moral truth are as essential to poetry 
as those of physical truth (Anatomy and Optics for instance) are 
to painting. Allegory, narration, and the drama, make their 
last appeal to the ethics of the human heart. It is therefore 
unsafe to draw a marked distinction between morality and poetry, 
or to speak of " solid observations on life^^ as of things in their 
nature unpoetical ; for we do meet in poetry with observations 
on life which for the charm of their solid truth we should 
exchange with reluctance for the most ingenious touches of 
fancy. 

The school of the Wartons, considering them as poets, was 
rather too studiously prone to description. The doctor, like his 
brother, certainly so far realised his own ideas of inspiration as 
to burthen his verse with few observations on life which oppress 
the mind by their solidity. To his brother he is obviously inferior 
in the graphic and romantic style of composition at which he 
aimed, but in which it must nevertheless be owned that in some 
parts of his ' Ode to Fancy ' he has been pleasingly successful. 
Most of his poems are short and occasional, and (if I may venture 
to differ from the opinion of his amiable editor, Mr. Wooll) 
are by no means marked with originality. ' The Enthusiast ' 
was written at too early a period of his life to be a fair object 
of criticism. 



WILLIAM COWPER. 

[Born, 1731. Died, 1800.] 

William Cowper was born at Berkhamstead, in Hertfordshire. 
His grandfather was Spencer Cowper, a judge of the Court of 
Common Pleas, and a younger brother of the Lord Chancellor 
Cowper. His father was the rector of Great Berkhamstead, and 
chaplain to George II. At six years of age he was taken from 
the care of an indulgent mother, and placed at a school in Bed- 



412 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

fordshire.* He there endured such hardships as embittered his 
opinion of public education for all his life. His chief affliction 
was, to be singled out, as a victim of secret cruelty, by a young 
monster, about fifteen years of age, whose barbarities were, how- 
ever, at last detected, and punished by his expulsion. Cowper 
was also taken from the school. From the age of eight to nine 
he was boarded with a famous oculist, f on account of a complaint 
in his eyes, which, during his whole life, were subject to inflam- 
mation. He was sent from thence to Westminster, and con- 
tinued there till the age of eighteen, when he went into the office 
of a London solicitor. His account of himself in this situation 
candidly acknowledges his extreme idleness. " I did actually 
live," he says, in a letter to Lady Hesketh, " three years with Mr. 
Chapman, a solicitor ; that is to say, I slept three years in his 
house. I spent my days in Southampton-row, as you verj" well 
remember. There was I and the future Lord Chancellor Thur- 
low constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and 
making giggle." From the solicitor's house he went into cham- 
bers in the Temple ; but seems to have made no application to 
the study of the law. " Here he rambled," says Mr. Hayley, 
*' to use his own colloquial expression, from the thorny road of 
jurisprudence to the primrose paths of literature," — a most uncol- 
loquial expression indeed, and savouring much more of Mr. 
Hayley's genius than his own. At this period he wrote some 
verse translations from Horace, which he gave to the Buncombes, 
ajid assisted Lloyd and Colman with some prose papers for their 
periodical works. J It was only at this time that Cowper could 
ever be said to have lived as a man of the world. Though shy 

* In Hayley's ' Life ' his first school is said to have been in Hertford- 
shire ; the 'Memoir' of his early life, published in 1816, says in Bc-dford- 
shire. [In Cowper's account of his own early life, this school is said to 
have been in Bedfordshire ; but Hayley says Hertfordshire, mentioning also 
the place and name of the master ; and as Cowper -was only at one private 
school, subsequent biographers have properly followed Hayley. The mis- 
take probably originated in the press, Cowper's own 'Memoirs' having 
apparently been printed from an ill-written manuscript. Of this there is a 
■whimsical proof (p. 35}, where the ' Persian Letters ' of Montesquieu are 
spoken of, and the compositor, unable to decipher that Author's name, has 
converted it into Mules Quince. — Southey, Life of Coicper, vol. i. p. 7.] 

t He does not inform us where, but calls the oculist Mr. D. Hayley, by 
mistake I suppose, says that he was boarded with a female oculist. [He 
■was placed in the house of an eminent oculist, whose wife also had obtained 
great celebrity in the same branch of medical science.— Southey.] 

X [' The Connoisseur,' and ' St. James's Chronicle.'] 



I 



COWPER. 413 



to strangers, he was highly valued, for his wit and pleasantry, 
amidst an intimate and gay circle of men of talents. But though 
he was then in the focus of convivial society, he never partook of 
its intemperance. 

His patrimony being well-nigh spent, a powerful friend and 
relation (Major Cowper) obtained for him the situation of Clerk 
to the Committees of the House of Lords ; but, on account of 
his dislike to the publicity of the situation, the appointment was 
changed to that of Clerk of the Journals of the same House.* 
The path to an easy maintenance now seemed to lie open before 
him; but a calamitous disappointment was impending, the 
approaches of which are best explained in his own words. " In 
the beginning," he says, " a strong opposition to my friend's right 
of nomination began to show itself. A powerful party was 
formed among the Lords to thwart it. * * * Every advantage, 
I was told, would be sought for, and eagerly seized, to disconcert 
us. I was bid to expect an'examination at the bar of the House, 
touching my sufficiency for the post I had taken. Being neces- 
sarily ignorant of the nature of that business, it became expedient 
that I should visit the office daily, in order to qualify myself for 
the strictest scrutiny. All the horror of my fears and perplexities 
now returned. A thunderbolt would have been as welcome to 
me as this intelligence. I knew to demonstration that upon 
these terms the Clerkship of the Journals was no place for me. 
To require my attendance at the bar of the House, that I might 
there publicly entitle myself to the office, was, in effect, to ex- 
clude me from it. In the mean time, the interest of my friend, 
the honour of his choice, my own reputation and circumstances, 
all urged me forward, all pressed me to undertake that which I 
saw to be impracticable. They whose spirits are formed like 
mine, to whom a public exhibition of themselves, on any occasion, 
is mortal poison, may have some idea of the horrors of my situa- 
tion — others can have none. My continual misery at length 
brought on a nervous fever ; quiet forsook me by day, and peace 
by night ; a finger raised against me was more than I could stand 
against. In this posture of mind I attended regularly at the 
office, where, instead of a soul upon the rack, the most active 
spirits were essentially necessary for my purpose. I expected 
no assistance from anybody there, all the inferior clerks being 

* [His kinsman Major Cowper was the patentee of these appointments.] 



414 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

under the influence of my opponent, and accordingly I received 
none. The Journal books were indeed thrown open to me ; a 
thing which could not be refused, and from which perhaps a man 
in health, and with a liead turned to business, might have gained 
all the information he wanted; but it was not so with me. I 
read without perception, and was so distressed, that, had every 
clerk in the office been my friend, it could have availed me little ; 
for I was not in a condition to receive instruction, much less to 
elicit it out of MSS. without direction. Many months went 
over me thus employed ; constant in the use of means, despairing 
as to the issue. The feelings of a man when he arrives at the 
place of execution are probably much like mine every time I set 
my foot in the office, which was every day for more than half a 
year together." These agonies at length unsettled his brain. 
When his benevolent friend came to him, on the day appointed 
for his examination at Westminster, he found him in a dreadful 
condition. He had, in fact, the same morning, made an attempt 
at self-destruction ; and showed a garter which had been broken, 
and an iron rod across his bed which had been bent, in the effort 
to accomplish his purpose by strangulation. From the state of 
his mind, it became necessary to remove him to the house of Dr. 
Cotton, of St. Alban's,* with whom he continued for about nine- 
teen months. Within less tlian the half of that time his faculties 
began to return ; and the religious despair, which constituted 
the most tremendous circumstance of his malady, had given way 
to more consoling views of faith and piety. On his recovery he 
determined to renounce London for ever ; and, that he might 
have no temptation to return thither, gave up the office of com- 
missioner of bankrupts, worth about 60/. a-year, which he had 
held for some years. He then, in June 1765; repaired to Hun- 
tingdon, where he settled in lodgings, attended by a man-servant, 
who followed him from Dr. Cotton's out of pure attachment. 
His brother, who had accompanied him thither, had no sooner 
left hinj, than, being alone among strangers, his spirits began 
again to sink ; and he found himself, he says, *' like a traveller 
in the midst of an inhospitable desert; without a friend to com 
fort or a guide to direct him>" For four months he continued in 
his lodging. Some few neighbours came to see him ; but their 
visits were not very frequent, and he rather declined than sought 
* [Author of * Visions in Verse,' * The Fireside/ &c.] 



i 



COWPER. 415 



society. At length, however, young Mr. Unwin, the son of the 
clergyman of the place, having been struck by his interesting 
appearance at church, introduced himself to his acquaintance, 
and brought him to visit at his father's house. A mutual friend- 
ship was very soon formed between Cowper and this amiable 
family, whose religious sentiments peculiarly corresponded with 
the predominant impressions of his mind. The Unwins, much 
to his satisfaction, agreed to receive him as a boarder in their 
house. His routine of life in this devout circle is best described 
by himself. " We breakfast," he says in one of his letters, ^' com- 
monly between eight and nine ; till eleven we read either the 
Scriptures or the sermons of some faithful preacher of those 
holy mysteries. At eleven we attend divine service, which is 
performed here twice every day ; and from twelve to three we 
separate and amuse ourselves as we please. During that interval 
I either read in my own apartment, or walk, or ride, or work in 
the garden. We seldom sit an hour after dinner, but, if the 
weather permits, adjourn to the garden, where with Mrs. Unwin 
and her son, I have generally the pleasure of religious conversa- 
tion. If it rains or is too windy for walking, we either converse 
within doors or sing some hymns of Martin's* collection, and by 
the help of Mrs. Un win's harpsichord make up a tolerable con- 
cert, in wliich our hearts I hope are the most musical performers. 
After tea we sally forth to walk in good earnest, and we gene- 
rally travel four miles before we see home again. At night we 
read and converse as before till supper, and commonly finish the 
evening with hymns or a sermon." 

After the death of Mr. Unwin senior, in 1767, he accom- 
panied Mrs. Unwin and her daughter to a new residence which 
they chose at Olney, in Buckinghamshire. Here he formed an 
intimate friendship with Mr. Newton, then curate of Olney, with 
whom he voluntarily associated himself in the duty of visiting 
the cottages of the poor, and comforting their distresses. Mr. 
Newton and he were joint almoners in the secret donations of 
the wealthy and charitable Mr. Thornton, who transmitted 200/. 
a-year for the poor of Olney. At Mr. Newton's request he 
wrote some hymns, which were published in a collection long 
before he was known as a poet. 

His tremendous malady unhappily returned in 1773, attended 
* Martin Madan, a cousin of the poet. 



416 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

with severe paroxysms of religious despondency, and his faculties 
were again eclipsed for about five years. During that period 
Mrs. Unwin watched over him with a patience and tenderness 
truly maternal. After his second recovery, some of his amuse- 
ments, such as taming hares and making bird-cages, would seem 
to indicate no great confidence in the capacity of his mind for 
mental employment. But he still continued to be a cursory 
reader ; he betook himself also to drawing landscapes ; and, 
what might have been still less expected at fifty years of age, 
began in earnest to cultivate his poetical talents. These had 
lain, if not dormant, at least so slightly employed as to make 
his poetical progress, in the former part of his life, scarcely 
capable of being traced.* He spent, however, the winter of 
1780-1 in preparing his first volume of Poems for the press, 
consisting of ' Table Talk,' ' Hope,' ' The Progress of Error,' 
' Charity,' &c., and it was publisiied in 1782. Its reception was 
not equal to its merit, though his modest expectations were not 
upon the whole disappointed ; and he had the satisfaction of 
ranking Dr. Johnson and Benjamin Franklin among 1iis zealous 
admirers. The volume was certainly good fruit under a rough 
rind, conveying manly thoughts, but in a tone of enthusiasm 
which is often harsh and forbidding. 

In the same year that he published his first volume an elegant 
and accomplished visitant came to Olney, with whom Cowper 
formed an acquaintance that was for some time very delightful 
to him. This was the widow of Sir Robert Austen. She had 
wit, gaiety, agreeable manners, and elegant taste. "While she 
enlivened Cowper's unequal spirits by her conversation, she was 
also the taskmistress of his Muse. He began his great original 
poem at her suggestion, and was exhorted by her to undertake 
the translation of Homer. So much cheerfulness seems to have 
beamed upon his sequestered Life from the influence of her 
society, that he gave her the endearing appellation of Sister 
Anne, and ascribed the arrival of so pleasing a friend to the 
direct interposition of Heaven. But his devout old friend Mrs. 
Unwin saw nothing very providential in the ascendancy of a 
female so much more fascinating than herself over Cowper's 

* At the age of eighteen he wrote some tolerable verses on finding the 
heel of a shoe ; a subject which is not uncharacteristic of his disposition to 
moralise on whimsical matters. 



COWPER. 417 



mind ; and, appealing to his gratitude for her past services, she 
gave him his choice of either renouncing Lady Austen's ac- 
quaintance or her own. Cowper decided upon adhering to the 
friend who had watched over him in his deepest afflictions, and 
sent Lady Austen a valedictory letter, couched in terms of regret 
and regard, but which necessarily put an end to their acquaint- 
ance. Whether in making this decision he sacrificed a passion 
or only a friendship for Lady Austen, it must be impossible to 
tell ; but it has been said, though not by Mr. Hayley, that the 
remembrance of a deep and devoted attachment of his youth was 
never effaced by any succeeding impression of the same nature, 
and that his fondness for Lady Austen was as platonic as for 
Mary Unvvin. The sacrifice, however, cost him much pain, and 
is perhaps as much to be admired as regretted.* 

Fortunately the jealousy of Mrs. Unwin did not extend to his 
cousin, Lady Hesketh. His letters to that lady give the most 
pleasing view of Cowper's mind, exhibiting all the warmth of 
his heart as a kinsman, and his simple and unstudied elegance 
as a correspondent. His intercourse with this relation, after a 
separation of nearly thirty years, was revived by her writing to 
congratulate him on the appearance of his ' Task,' in 1784. 
Two years after Lady Hesketh paid him a visit at Olney ; and, 
settling at Weston, in the immediate neighbourhood, provided a 
house for him and Mrs. Unwin there, which was more commo- 
dious than their former habitation. She also brought her car- 
riage and horses with her, and thus induced him to survey the 
country in a wider range than he had been hitherto accustomed 
to take, as well as to mix a little more with its inhabitants. As 
soon as ' The Task ' had been sent to the press, he began the 
' Tirocinium,' a poem on the subject of education, the purport 
of which was (in his own words) to censure the want of discipline 
and the inattention to morals which prevail in public schools, 
and to recommend private education as preferable on all accounts. 
In the same year, 1784, he commenced his translation of Homer, 
which was brought to a conclusion and published by subscription 
in 1791. The first edition of Homer was scarcely out of his 
hands when he embraced a proposal from a bookseller to be the 

* [" Both Lady Austen and Mrs. Unwin," says Southey, *' appear to me 
to have beea wronged by the causes assigned for the difference between 
them."] 

2 E 



418 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

editor of Milton's poetry, and to furnish a version of his Italian 
and Latin poems, together with a critical commentary on his 
whol^ works. Capable as he was of guiding the reader's atten- 
tion to the higher beauties of Milton, his habits and recluse 
situation made him peculiarly unfit for the more minute functions 
of an editor. In the progress of the work he seems to have 
been constantly drawn away by the anxious correction of his 
great translation ; insomuch that his second edition of Homer 
was rather a new work than a revisal of the old. The subsequent 
history of his life may make us thankful that the powers of his 
mind were spared to accomplish so great an undertaking. Their 
decline was fast approaching. In 1792 Mr. Hay ley paid him a 
visit at Olney, and was present to console him under his affliction 
at seeing Mrs. Unwin attacked by the palsy. The shock sub- 
sided, and a journey, which he undertook in company with Mrs. 
Unwin, to Mr. Hayley's at Eartham, contributed, with the genial 
air of the south, and the beautiful scenery of the country, to 
revive his spirits ; but they drooped, and became habitually 
dejected, on his return to Olney. In a moment of recovered 
cheerfulness he projected a poem on the four ages of man — • 
infancy, youth, manhood, and old age ; but he only finished a 
short fragment of it. Mr. Hayley paid him a second visit in the 
November of 1793 ; he found him still possessed of all his 
exquisite feelings, but there was something undescribable in his 
appearance, which foreboded his relapsing into hopeless despond- 
ency. Lady Hesketh repaired once more to Olney, and with a 
noble friendship undertook the care of two invalids, who were 
now incapable of managing themselves, Mrs. Unwin being at 
this time entirely helpless and paralytic. Upon a third visit, 
Mr. Hayley found him plunged into a melancholy torpor, which 
extinguished even his social feelings. He met Mr. Hayley with 
apparent indifference ; and when it was announced to him 
that his Majesty had bestowed on him a pension of 300/. a-year, 
the intelligence arrived too late to give him pleasure. He con- 
tinued under the care of Lady Hesketh until the end of July 
1795, when he was removed, together with Mrs. Unwin, to the 
house of his kinsman, Mr. Johnson, at North Tuddenham, in 
Norfolk. Stopping on the journey at the village of Eaton, near 
St. Neot's, Cowper walked with Mr. Johnson in the churcliyard 
of that village by moonlight, and talked with more composure 



COWPER. 419 



than he had shown for many months. The subject of their con- 
versation was the poet Thomson. Some time after he went to 
see his cousin Mrs. Bodham, at a village near the residence of 
Mr. Johnson. When he saw in Mrs. Bod ham's parlour a por- 
trait of himself, which had been done by Abbot, he clasped his 
hands in a paroxysm of distress, wishing that he could now be 
what he was when that likeness was taken. 

In December 1796 Mrs. Unwin died, in a house to which 
Mr. Johnson had removed, at Dunham, in the same county. 
Cowper, who had seen her half an hour before she expired, 
attended Mr. Johnson to survey her remains in the dusk of the 
evening ; but, after looking on her for a few moments, he started 
away, with a vehement unfinished exclamation of anguish ; and, 
either forgetting her in the suspension of his faculties, or not 
daring to trust his lips with the subject, he never afterwards 
uttered her name. 

In 1799 he resumed some power of exertion ; he finished the 
revision of his Homer, translated some of Gay's fables into Latin, 
and wrote his last original poem, ' The Castaway.'* But it 
seems, from the utterly desolate tone of that production, that the 
finishing blaze of his fancy and intellects had communicated no 
warmth of joy to his heart. The dropsy, which had become 
visible in his person, assumed an incurable aspect in the follow- 
ing year ; and after a rapid decline he expired on the 5th of 
April, 1800. 

The nature of Cowper's works makes us peculiarly identify 
the poet and the man in perusing them. As an individual, he 
was retired and weaned from the vanities of the world ; and as 
an original writer, he left the ambitious and luxuriant subjects of 
fiction and passion for those of real life and simple nature, and 
for the development of his own earnest feelings in behalf of 
moral and religious truth. His language has such a masculine 
idiomatic strength, and his manner, whether he rises into grace 
or falls into negligence, has so much plain and familiar freedom, 
that we read no poetry with a deeper conviction of its sentiments 
having come from the author's heart, and of the enthusiasm, in 
whatever he describes, having been unfeigned and unexaggerated. 

* [Founded upon an incident related in * Anson's Voyages.' It is the last 
original piece he composed, and, all circumstances considered, one of the 
most affecting that ever was composed.— Southey.] 

2e2 



420 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

He impresses us with the idea of a being whose fine spirit had 
been long enough in the mixed society of the world to be polished 
by its intercourse, and yet withdrawn so soon as to retain an 
unworldly degree of purity and simplicity. He was advanced 
in years before he became an author ; but his compositions dis- 
play a tenderness of feeling so youthfully preserved, and even 
a vein of humour so far from being extinguished by his ascetic 
habits, that we can scarcely regret his not having written them 
at an earlier period of life. For he blends the determination of 
age with an exquisite and ingenuous sensibility ; and though he 
sports very much with his subjects, yet, when he is in earnest, 
there is a gravity of long-felt conviction in his sentiments, which 
gives an uncommon ripeness of character to his poetry. 

It is due to Cowper to fix our regard on this unaffectedness 
and authenticity of his works, considered as representations of 
himself, because he forms a striking instance of genius writing 
the history of its own secluded feelings, reflections, and enjoy- 
ments, in a shape so interesting as to engage the imagination like 
a work of fiction. He has invented no character in fable, nor in 
the drama ; but he has left a record of his own character, which 
forms not only an object of deep sympathy, but a subject for the 
study of human nature. His verse, it is true, considered as such 
a record, abounds with opposite traits of severity and gentleness, 
of playfulness and superstition,* of solemnity and mirth, which 
appear almost anomalous ; and there is, undoubtedly, sometimes 
an air of moody versatility in the extreme contrasts of his feel- 
ings. But looking to his poetry as an entire structure, it has a 
massive air of sincerity. It is founded in steadfast principles of 
belief; and if we may prolong the architectural metaphor, 
though its arches may be sometimes gloomy, its tracery sportive, 
and its lights and shadows grotesquely crossed, yet altogether it 
still forms a vast, various, and interesting monument of the 
builder's mind. Young's works are as devout, as satirical, some- 
times as merry, as those of Cowper, and undoubtedly more witty. 

* Vide his story of INIisagathus [* The Task,' b. vi.], which is meant to 
record the miraculous punishment of a sinner by his own horse. Misaga- 
thus, a wicked fellow, as his name denotes, is riding abroad, and overtakes 
a sober-minded traveller on the road, whose ears he assails with the most 
improper language ; till his horse, out of all patience at his owner's impiety, 
approaches the brink of a precipice, and fairly tosses his reprobate rider 
into the sea. 



COWPER. 421 



But the melancholy and wit of Young do not make up to us the 
idea of a conceivable or natural being. He has sketched in his 
pages the ingenious but incongruous form of a fictitious mind — 
Cowper's soul speaks from his volumes. 

At the same time, while there is in Cowper a power of simple 
expression, of solid thought, and sincere feeling, which may 
be said, in a general vi€w, to make the harsher and softer traits 
of his genius harmonise, I cannot but recur to the observation 
that there are occasions when his contrarieties and asperities are 
positively unpleasing. Mr. Hayley commends him for possessing, 
above any ancient or modern author, the nice art of passing, by 
the most delicate transition, from subjects to subjects which 
might otherwise seem to be but little, or not at all, allied to 
each other — 

" From grave to gay, from lively to severe." 

With regard to Cowper's art of transition, I am disposed to 
agree with Mr. Hayley that it was very nice. In his own mind 
trivial and solemn subjects were easily associated, and he appears 
to make no effort in bringing them together. The transition 
sprang from the peculiar habits of his imagination, and was 
marked by the delicacy and subtlety of his powers. But the 
general taste and frame of the human mind is not calculated to 
receive pleasure from such transitions, however dexterously they 
may be made. The reader's imagination is never so passively 
in the hands of an author as not to compare the different im- 
pressions arising from successive passages ; and there is no 
versatility in the writer^s own thoughts that will give an air of 
natural connexion to subjects if it does not belong to them. 
Whatever Cowper's art of transition may be, the effect of it is 
to crowd into close contiguity his Dutch painting and divinity. 
This moment we view him, as if prompted by a disdain of all 
the gaudy subjects of imagination, sporting agreeably with every 
trifle that comes in his way ; in the next, a recollection of the 
most awful concerns of the human soul, and a belief that four- 
fifths of the species are living under the ban of their Creator's 
displeasure, come across his mind ; and we then, in the compass of 
a page, exchange the facetious satirist, or the poet of the garden 
or the greenhouse, for one who speaks to us in the name of the 
Omnipotent, and who announces to us all his terrors. No one, 



422 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

undoubtedly, shall prescribe limits to the association of devout 
and ordinary thoughts ; but still propriety dictates that the 
aspect of composition shall not rapidly turn from the smile of 
levity to a frown that denounces eternal perdition. 

He not only passes, within a short compass, from the jocose to 
the awful, but he sometimes blends them intimately together. 
It is fair that blundering commentators on the Bible should be 
exposed. The idea of a drunken postilion forgetting to put the 
linchpin in the wheel of his carriage may also be very entertain- 
ing to those whose safety is not endangered by his negligence ; 
but still the comparison of a false judgment which a perverse 
commentator may pass on the Holy Scriptures, with the accident 
of Tom the driver being in his cups, is somewhat too familiar 
for so grave a subject. The force, the humour, and picturesque- 
ness of those satirical sketches, which are interspersed with his 
religious poems on Hope, Truth, Charity, &c.,in his first volume, 
need not be disputed. One should be sorry to lose them, or 
indeed anything that Cowper has written, always saving and 
excepting the story of Misagathus and his horse, which might be 
mistaken for an interpolation by Mrs. Unwin. But in those 
satirical sketches there is still a taste of something like comic 
sermons, whether he describes the antiquated prude going to 
church, followed by lier footboy, with the dew-drop hanging at 
his nose, or Vinoso, in the military mess-room, thus expounding 
his religious belief: — 

" Adieu to all morality ! if Grace 
Make works a vain ingredient in the case. 
The Christian hope is — "Waiter, draw the cork — 
If I mistake not — Blockhead ! with a fork ! 
Without good works, whatever some may boast, 
Mere folly and delusion— Sir, your toast. 
My firm persuasion is, at least sometimes, 
That Heaven will weigh man's virtues and his crimes. 
****** ^ 

I glide and steal along with Heaven in view, 

And, — pardon me, the bottle stands with you." — Hope. 

The mirth of the above lines consists chiefly in placing the doc- 
trine of the importance of good works to salvation in the mouth 
of a drunkard. It is a Calvinistic poet making game of an 
anti-Calvinistic creed, and is an excellent specimen of pious 
bantering and evangelical raillery. But Religion, which disdains 
the hostility of ridicule, ought also to be above its alliance. 



COWPER. 423 



Against this practice of compounding mirth and godliness we 
may quote the poet's own remark upon St. Paul : — 

" So did not Paul. Direct me to a quip, 
Or merry turn, in all he ever wrote ; 
And I consent you take it for your text." 

And the Christian poet, by the solemnity of his subject, certainly 
identifies himself with the Christian preacher, who, as Cowper 
elsewhere remarks, should be sparing of his smile. The noble 
effect of one of his religious pieces, in which he has scarcely in 
any instance descended to the ludicrous, proves the justice of his 
own advice. His ' Expostulation ' is a poetical sermon — an elo- 
quent and sublime one. But there is no Hogarth-painting in 
this brilliant Scripture piece. Lastly, the objects of his satire 
are sometimes so unskilfully selected as to attract either a scanty 
portion of our indignation or none at all. AVhen he exposes 
real vice and enormity, it is with a power that makes the heart 
triumph in their exposure. But we are very little interested by 
his declamations on such topics as the effeminacy of modern 
soldiers, the prodigality of poor gentlemen giving cast clothes 
to their valets, or the finery of a country girl whose head-dress 
is " indebted to some smart vi^ig- weaver's hand." There is also 
much of the querulous laudator temporis acti in reproaching the 
English youths of his own day, who beat the French in trials of 
horsemanship, for not being like their forefathers, who beat the 
same people in contests for crowns ; as if there were anything 
more laudable in men butchering their fellow-creatures for the 
purposes of unprincipled ambition than employing themselves in 
the rivalship of manly exercise. One would have thought, too, 
that the gentle recluse of Olney, who had so often employed 
himself in makinc? boxes and bird-cat^i^es, mis^ht have had a little 



more indulgence for such as amuse themselves with chess and 
billiards than to inveigh so bitterly against those pastimes.* 

In the mean time, while the tone of his satire becomes rigid, 
that of his poetry is apt to grow relaxed. The saintly and 
austere artist seems to be so much afraid of making song a mere 
fascination to the ear, that he casts now and then a little rough- 
ness into his versification, particularly his rhymes ; not from a 
vicious ear, but merely to show that he de«pises being smooth ; 
forgetting that our language has no superfluous harmony to 
* [See 'The Task,' b. vi. 1. 2G5 to 1. 277-1 



424 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

throw away, and that the roughness of verse is not its strength 
but its weakness — the stagnation of the stream, and not its 
forcible current. Apparently, also, from the fear of ostentation 
in language, he occasionally sinks his expression into flatness. 
Even in his high-toned poem of ' Expostulation,' he tells Britain 
of the time when she was a '* puling starveling chit."* 

Considering the tenor and circumstances of his life, it is not 
much to be wondered at that some asperities and peculiarities 
should have adhered to the strong stem of his genius, like the 
moss and fungus that cling to some noble oak of the forest 
amidst the damps of its unsunned retirement. It is more sur- 
prising that he preserved in such seclusion so much genuine 
power of comic observation. Though he himself acknowledged 
having written " many things with bile " in his first volume,"}" 
yet his satire has many legitimate objects ; and it is not abstracted 
and declamatory satire, but it places human manners before us 
in the liveliest attitudes and clearest colours. There is much of 
the full distinctness of Theophrastus, and of the nervous and 
concise spirit of La Bruyere, in his piece entitled ' Conversation,* 
with a cast of humour superadded which is' peculiarly English, 
and not to be found out of England. Nowhere have the sophist 
— the dubious man, whose evidence, 

" For want of prominence and just relief, 
Would hang an honest man, and save a thief" — Conversation — 

the solemn fop, an oracle behind an empt)^ cask — the sedentary 

weaver of long tales — the emphatic speaker, 

•who dearly loves to oppose. 



In contact inconvenient, nose to nose" — Conversation — 
nowhere have these characters, and all the most prominent 
nuisances of colloqtiial intercourse, together with the bashful 
man, who is a nuisance to himself, been more happily delineated. 
One species of purity his satires possess, which is, that they are 
never personal. :[ To his high-minded views, 

* [" While yet thou wast a groveling puling chit. 

Thy bones not fashion'!, and thy joints not knit." — 

Expostulation. "l 
f [Southeys ' Cowper,' vol. i. p. 261, and vol. ii. p. 183.] 
X A single exception may be made to this remark, in the instance of 
Occiduus, whose musical Sunday parties he reprehended, and who was 
known to mean the Rev. G. Wesley. [See ' The Progress of Error :' — 
"Beneath well-soundiug Greek 
I slur a name a j/oet must not speak." — Hope.} I know 



COWPER. 425 



" An individual was a sacred mark, 
Not to be struck in sport, or in the dark." 

Every one knows from how accidental a circumstance his 
greatest original work, ' The Task/ took its rise, namely, from 
his having one day complained to Lady Austen that he knew not 
what subject of poetry to choose, and her having told him to take 
her sofa for his theme. The mock-heroic commencement of 
' The Task' has been censured as a blemish.* The general 
taste, I believe, does not find it so. Mr. Hayley's commendation 
of his art of transition may, in this instance, be fairly admitted, 
for he quits his ludicrous history of the sofa, and glides into a 
description of other objects by an easy and natural association of 
thoughts. His whimsical outset in a work where he promises 
so little and performs so much may even be advantageously con- 
trasted with those magnificent commencements of poems which 
pledge both the reader and the writer, in good earnest, to a task. 
Cowper's poem, on the contrary, is like a river, which rises from 
a playful little fountain, and which gathers beauty and magnitude 
as it proceeds. 

" velut tenui nascens de fomite rivus 

Per tacitas, primum nullo cum murmure, valles 
Serpit ; et ut patrii se sensim e margine fontis 
Largius effudit ; pluvios modo coUigit imbres, 
Et postquam spatio vires accepit et undas," &c. 

Buchanan. 

He leads us abroad into his daily walks ; he exhibits the land- 
scapes which he was accustomed to contemplate, and the trains 
of thought in which he habitually indulged. No attempt is 
made to interest us in legendary fictions or historical recollec- 
tions connected with the ground over which he expatiates ; all is 
plainness and reality ; but we instantly recognise the true poet 
in the clearness, sweetness, and fidelity of his scenic draughts, in 
his power of giving novelty to what is common, and in the high 
relish, the exquisite enjoyment of rural sights and sounds which 
he communicates to the spirit. " His eyes drink the rivers with 
delight."! He excites an idea, that almost amounts to sensation, 

I know not to whom he alludes in these lines : — 

" Nor he who, for the bane of thousands born, 
^'^ ■ Built God a church, and la»gh'd His word to scorn." 

:iL. f« The Calvinist meant Voltaire, and the church of Ferney, with its in- 
scription, Deo erexit Voltaire."— Byron, Works, vol. xvi. p. 1 24. See also 
Sauthey's ' Cow per,' vol. viii. p. 305.] 
'-, ?* In ' The Edinburgh Review.' f An expression in one of his letters. 



426 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

of the freshness and delight of a rural walk, even when he leads 
us to the wasteful common, which, 

" overgrown with fern, and rough 

With prickly goss, that, shapeless and deform, 

And dang'rous to the touch, has yet its bloom. 

And decks itself with ornaments of gold, 

Yields no unpleasing ramble ; there the turf 

Smells fresh, and, rich in odorif rous herbs 

And fungous fruits of earth, regales the sense 

With luxury of unexpected sweets.'' — The Task, b. i. 

His rural prospects have far less variety and compass than those 
of Thomson ; but his graphic touches are more close and minute : 
not that Thomson was either deficient or undeJightful in circum- 
stantial traits of the beauty of nature, but he looked to her as a 
whole more than Cowper. His genius was more excursive and 
philosophical. The poet of Olney, on the contrary, regarded 
human philosophy with something of theological contempt. To 
his eye the great and little things of this world were levelled into 
an equality by his recollection of the power and purposes of Him 
who made them. They are in his view only as toys spread on 
the lap and carpet of nature for the childhood of our immortal 
being. This religious indifference to the world is far indeed from 
blunting his sensibility to the genuine and simple beauties of 
creation, but it gives his taste a contentment and fellowship 
with humble things. It makes him careless of selecting and 
refining his views of nature beyond their casual appearance. He 
contemplated the face of plain rural English life in moments of 
leisure and sensibility, till its minutest features were impressed 
upon his fancy; and he sought not to embellish what he loved. 
Hence his landscapes have less of the ideally beautiful than 
Thomson's; but they have an unrivalled charm of truth and 
reality. 

The flat country where he resided certainly exhibited none of 
those wilder graces of nature which he had sufficient genius to 
have delineated ; and yet there are perhaps few romantic descrip- 
tions of rocks, precipices, and torrents, which we should prefer 
to the calm English character and familiar repose of the following 
landscape. It is in the finest manner of Cowper, and unites all 
his accustomed fidelity and distinctness with a softness and deli- 
cacy which are not always to be found in his specimens of the 
picturesque : — 



COWPER. 427 



" How oft upon yon eminence our pace 
Has slacken'd to a pause, and we have borne 
The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew, 
While Admiration, feeding at the eye, 
And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene. 
Thence with what pleasure have we just discern'd 
The distant plough slow moving, and beside 
His laboring team, that swerved not from the track, 
The sturdy swain diminish'd to a boy ! 
Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain 
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er, 
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course 
Delighted. There, fast rooted in their bank, 
Stand, never overlooked, our favourite elms, 
That screen the hei'dsman's solitary hut ; 
While far beyond, and overthwart the stream, 
That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale. 
The sloping land recedes into the clouds ; 
Displaying on its varied side the grace 
Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tower. 
Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells 
Just undulates upon the list'ning ear. 
Groves, heaths, and smoking villages, remote." 

The Task, b. i. 

The whole scene is so defined, that one longs to see it transferred 
to painting. 

He is one of the few poets who have indulged neither in 
descriptions nor acknowledgments of the passion of love ; but 
there is no poet who has given us a finer conception of the 
amenity of female influence. Of all the verses that have been 
ever devoted to the subject of domestic happiness, thbse in his 
* Winter Evening,' at the opening of the fourth book of ' The 
Task/ are perhaps the most beautiful. In perusing that scene of 
" intimate delights," " fireside enjoyments," and " home-born 
happiness," we seem to recover a part of the forgotten value of 
existence, when we recognise the means of its blessedness so 
widely dispensed and so cheaply attainable, and find them sus- 
ceptible of description at once so enchanting and so faithful. 

Though the scenes of ' The Task ' are laid in retirement, the 

poem aflfords an amusing perspective of human affairs.* Remote 

as the poet was from the stir of the great Babel — from the " co7t- 

fusce. sonus urbis el illcBtahile murmur " — he glances at most of 

the subjects of public interest which engaged the attention of his 

* [Is not ' The Task ' a glorious poem ? The religion of ' The Task,' 
bating a few scraps of Calvinistic divinity, is the religion of God and Na- 
ture ; the religion that exalts and ennobles man. — Burns to Mrs. Dmilop, 
25th December, 1795.] 



428 LIVES OF THE POETS. 



contemporaries. On those subjects it is but faint praise to say- 
that he espoused the side of justice and humanity. Abundance 
of mediocrity of talent is to be found on the same side, rather 
injuring- than promoting the cause by its officious declamation. 
But nothing can be farther from the stale commonplace and 
cuckooism of sentiment than the philanthropic eloquence of 
Cowper — he speaks " like one having authority." Society is his 
debtor. Poetical expositions of the horrors of slavery may 
indeed seem very unlikely agents in contributing to destroy it ; 
and it is possible that the most refined planter in the "West Indies 
may look with neither shame nor compunction on his own image 
in the pages of Cowper, exposed as a being degraded by giving 
stripes and tasks to his fellow-creature. But such appeals to the 
heart of the community are not lost. They fix themselves 
silently in the popular memory, and they become at last a part 
of that public opinion which must sooner or later wrench the lash 
from the hand of the oppressor. 

I should have ventured to offer a few remarks on the shorter 
poems of Cowper, as well as on his translation of Homer, if I 
had not been fearful, not only of trespassing on the reader's 
patience, but on the boundaries which I have been obliged to 
prescribe to myself in the length of these notices. There are 
many zealous admirers of the poet who will possibly refuse all 
quarter to the observations on his defects which I have freely made ; 
but there are few who have read him, I conceive, who have been 
so slightly delighted as to think I have overrated his descrip- 
tions of external nature, his transcripts of human manners, or his 
powers, as a moral poet, of inculcating those truths and affec- 
tions which make the heart feel itself better and more happy. 



ERASMUS DARWIN. 

[Born, 1732. Died, 1802.] 

Erasmus Darwin was born at Elton, near Newark, in Not- 
tinghamshire, where his father was a private gentleman. He 
studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, and took the degree 
of bachelor in medicine ; after which he went to Edinburgh to 
finish his medical studies. Having taken a physician's degree at 
that university, he settled in his profession at Lichfield ; and, by 



DARWIN. 429 



a bold and successful display of his skill in one of the first cases 
to which he was called, established his practice and reputation. 
About a year after his arrival he married a Miss Howard, the 
daughter of a respectable inhabitant of Lichfield, and by that 
connexion strengthened his interest in the place. He was, in 
theory and practice, a rigid enemy to the use of wine and of all 
intoxicating liquors ; and, in the course of his practice, was re- 
garded as a great promoter of temperate habits among the 
citizens : but he gave a singular instance of his departure from 
his own theory within a few years after his arrival in the very 
place where he proved the apostle of sobriety. Having one day 
joined a few friends who were going on a water-party, he got so 
tipsy after a cold collation, that, on the boat approaching Not- 
tingham, he jumped into the river and swam ashore. The party 
called to the philosopher to return ; but he walked on de- 
liberately, in his wet clothes, till he reached the market-place of 
Nottingham, and was there found by his friend, an apothecary 
of the place, haranguing the townspeople on the benefit of fresh 
air, till he was persuaded by his friend to come to his house and 
shift his clothes. Dr. Darwin stammered habitually; but on 
this occasion wine untied his tongue. In the prime of life he 
had the misfortune to break the patella of his knee, in conse- 
quence of attempting to drive a carriage of his own Utopian 
contrivance, which upset at the first experiment. 

He lost his first wife after thirteen years of domestic union. 
During his widowhood, Mrs. Pole, the wife of a Mr. Pole, of 
Redburn, in Derbyshire, brought her children to his house to 
be cured of a poison which they had taken in the shape of 
medicine, and, by his invitation, she continued with him till the 
young patients were perfectly cured. He was soon after called 
to attend the lady, at her own house, in a dangerous fever, and 
prescribed with more than a physician's interest in her fate. Not 
being invited to sleep in the house the night after his arrival, 
he spent the hours till morning beneath a tree opposite to her 
apartment, watching the passing and repassing lights. While 
the life which he so passionately loved was in danger, he para- 
phrased Petrarch's celebrated sonnet on the dream which pre- 
dicted to him the death of Laura. Though less favoured by the 
Muse than Petrarch, he was more fortunate in love. Mrs. Pole, 
on the demise of an aged partner, accepted Dr. Darwin's hand 



430 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

ill 1781 ; and, in compliance with her inclinations, he removed 
from Lichfield to practice at Derby. He had a family by his 
second wife, and continued in high professional reputation till 
his death, in 1802, which was occasioned by angina pectoris, the 
result of a sudden cold. 

Dr. Darwin was between forty and fifty before he began the 
principal poem by which he is known. Till then he had written 
only occasional verses, and of these he was not ostentatious, fear- 
ing that it might affect his medical reputation to be thought a 
poet. When his name as a physician had, however, been esta- 
blished, he ventured, in the year 1781, to publish the first part of 
his * Botanic Garden.' Mrs. Anna Seward, in her ' Life of Darwin,' 
declares herself the authoress of the opening lines of the poem ; 
but as she had never courage to make this pretension during Dr. 
Darwin's life, her veracity on the subject is exposed to suspicion.* 
In 1789 and 1792 the second and third parts of his botanic poem 
appeared. In 1793 and 1796 he published the first and second 
parts of his ' Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life.' In 1801 
he published ' Phytologia, or the Philosophy of Agriculture and 
Gardening ;' and, about the same time, a small treatise on female 
education, which attracted little notice. After his death appeared 
his poem * The Temple of Nature,' a mere echo of ' The Botanic 
Garden.' 

Darwin was a materialist in poetry no less than in philosophy. 
In the latter he attempts to build systems of vital sensibility on 
mere mechanical principles ; and in the former he paints every- 
thing to the mind's eye, as if the soul had no pleasure beyond the 
vivid conception of form, colour, and motion. JSTothing makes 
poetry more lifeless than description by abstract terms and 
general qualities ; but Darwin runs to the opposite extreme of 
prominently glaring circumstantial description, without shade, 
relief, or perspective. 

His celebrity rose and fell with unexampled rapidity. His 
poetry appeared at a time peculiarly favourable to innovation, 
and his attempt to wed poetry and science was a bold experiment, 
which had some apparent sanction from the triumphs of modern 
discovery. When Lucretius wrote, Science was in her cradle ; 

* [" I was at Lichfield," writes K. L. 'Edge worth to Sir Walter Scott, " when 
the lines in question were written by Miss Seward." — Edgeicorth's Memoirs, 
vol. ii. p. 267.J 



BEATTIE. 431 



but modern philosophy had revealed truths in nature more 

sublime than the marvels of fiction. The Rosicrucian machinery 

of his poem had, at the first glance, an imposing appearance, and 

the variety of his allusion was surprising. On a closer view it 

was observable that the Botanic goddess, and her Sylphs and 

Gnomes, were useless from their having no employment, and 

tiresome from being the mere pretexts for declamation. The 

variety of allusion is very whimsical. Dr. Franklin is compared 

to Cupid ; whilst Hercules, Lady Melbourne, Emma Crewe, 

Brindley's canals, and sleeping cherubs, sweep on like images in 

a dream. Tribes and grasses are likened to angels, and the truflfle 

is rehearsed as a subterranean empress. His laborious ingenuity 

in finding comparisons is frequently like that of Hervey in his 

' Meditations,' or of Flavel in his ' Gardening Spiritualized.' 

If Darwin, however, was not a good poet, it may be owned 

that he is frequently a bold personifier, and that some of his 

insulated passages are musical and picturesque. His ' Botanic 

Garden' once pleased many better judges than his affected 

biographer Anna Seward ; it fascinated even the taste of Cowper, 

who says, in conjunction with Hayley, 

" We, therefore pleased, extol thy song, 
Though various yet complete, 
Eich in embellishment, as sti'ong 
And learned as 'tis sweet ; 

And deem the bard, whoe'er he be, 

And howsoever known. 
That will not weave a wreath for thee, 

Unworthy of his own." 



JAMES BEATTIE. 

[Born, 1735. Died, 1803.] 

James Beattie was born in the parish of Lawrence Kirk, in 
Kincardineshire, Scotland. His father, who rented a small farm 
in that parish, died when the poet was only seven years old ; but 
the loss of a protector was happily supplied to him by his elder 
brother, who kept him at school till he obtained a bursary at the 
Marischal College, Aberdeen. At that university he took the 
degree of master of arts ; and, at nineteen, he entered on the 
study of divinity, supporting himself in the mean time by teach- 
ing a school in the neighbouring parish. AYhilst he was in this 



432 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

obscure situation, some pieces of verse, which he transmitted to 
* The Scottish Magazine,' gained him a little local celebrity. 
Mr. Garden, an eminent Scottish lawyer, afterwards Lord Gar- 
denstone, and Lord Monboddo, encouraged him as an ingenious 
young man, and introduced him to the tables of the neighbour- 
ing gentry — an honour not usually extended to a parochial 
schoolmaster. In 1757 he stood candidate for the place of usher 
in the high-school of Aberdeen. He was foiled by a competitor 
who surpassed him in the minutiae of Latin grammar ; but his 
character as a scholar suffered so little by the disappointment, 
that at the next vacancy he was called to the place without a 
trial. He had not been long at this school when, in 1761, he 
published a volume of original poems and translations, which (it 
speaks much for the critical clemency of the times) were favour- 
ably received, and highly commended in the Englisli Reviews. 
So little satisfied was the author himself with those early effusions, 
that, excepting four, which he admitted to a subsequent edition 
of his works, he was anxious to have them consigned to oblivion ; 
and he destroyed every copy of the volume which he could pro- 
cure. About the age of twenty-six he obtained the chair of 
Moral Philosophy in the Marischal College of Aberdeen, a pro- 
motion which he must have owed to his general reputation in 
literature : but it is singular that the friend who first proposed 
to solicit the High Constable of Scotland to obtain this appoint- 
ment should have grounded the proposal on the merit of Beattie's 
poetry. In the volume already mentioned there can scarcely 
be said to be a budding promise of genius. 

Upon his appointment to this professorship, which he held for 
forty years, he immediately prepared a course of lectures for the 
students ; and gradually compiled materials for those prose works 
on which his name would rest with considerable reputation if he 
were not known as a poet. It is true that he is not a first-rate 
metaphysician ; and the Scotch, in undervaluing his powers of 
abstract and close reasoning, have been disposed to give him less 
credit than he deserves as an elegant and amusing writer. But 
the English, who must be best able to judge of his style, admire 
it for an ease, familiarity, and an Anglicism that is not to be 
found even in the correct and polished diction of Blair. His 
mode of illustrating abstract questions is fanciful and interesting. 

In 1765 he published a poem entitled 'The Judgment of 



BEATTIE. 433 



Paris/ which his biographer, Sir William Forbes, did not think 
fit to rank among his works.* For more obvious reasons Sir 
William excluded his lines, written in the subsequent year, on 
the proposal for erecting a monument to Churchill in West- 
minster Abbey^ — lines which have no beauty or dignity to redeem 
their bitter expression of hatred. On particular subjects. Beat- 
tie's virtuous indignation was apt to be hysterical. Dr. Eeid 
and Dr. Campbell hated the principles of David Hume as 
sincerely as the author of the * Essay on Truth ;' but they 
never betrayed more than philosophical hostility, while Beattie 
used to speak of the propriety of excluding Hume from civil 
society. 

His reception of Gray, when that poet visited Scotland in 
1 765, shows the enthusiasm of his literary character in a finer 
light. Gray's mind was, not in poetry only, but in many other 
respects, peculiarly congenial with his own ; and nothing could 
exceed the cordial and reverential welcome which Beattie gave 
to his illustrious visitant. In 1770 he published his ' Essay on 
Truth,' which had a rapid sale and extensive popularity ; and, 
within a twelvemonth after, the first part of his ^ Minstrel.' The 
poem appeared at first anonymously, but its beauties were imme- 
diately and justly appreciated. The second part was not pub- 
lished till 1774. When Gray criticised 'The Minstrel' he 
objected to its author, that, after many stanzas, the description 
went on and the narrative stopped. t Beattie very justly 
answered to this criticism, that he meant the poem for descrip- 
tion, not for incident. But he seems to have forgotten this 
proper apology when he mentions, in one of his letters, his 
intention of producing Edwin, in some subsequent books, in the 
character of a warlike bard inspiring his countrymen to battle, 
and contributing to repel their invaders.^ This intention, if he 
ever seriously entertained it, might have produced some new 

* It is to be found in ' The Scottish Magazine ;' and, if I may judge from 
an obscure recollection of it, is at least as well worthy of revival as some of 
his minor pieces, [See it also in the Aldine edition of Beattie, p. 97.] 

t Gray complained of a want of action. " As to description," he says, 
" I have always thought that it made the most graceful ornament of poetry, 
but never ought to make the subject."] 

X [This was no written intention, but one delivered orally in reply to a 
question from Sir William Forbes, An invasion, however, had been for long 
a settled point — some great service that the minstrel was to do his country ; 
but his plan was never concerted."' 

2 P 



434 LIVES OF THE POETS. 

kind of poem, but would have formed an incongruous counter- 
part to the piece as it now stands, which, as a picture of still life, 
and a vehicle of contemplative morality, has a charm that is 
inconsistent with the bold evolutions of heroic narrative. After 
having portrayed his young enthusiast with such advantage in a 
state of visionary quiet, it would have been too violent a transi- 
tian to have begun in a new book to surround him with dates of 
time and names of places. The interest which we attach to 
Edwin's character would have been lost in a more ambitious 
effort to make him a greater or more important or more locally- 
defined being. It is the solitary growth of his genius, and his 
isolated and mystic abstraction from mankind, that fix our atten- 
tion on the romantic features of that genius. The simplicity of 
his fate does not divert us from his mind to his circumstances. 
A more unworldly air is given to his character, that, instead of 
being tacked to the fate of kings, he was one " who envied not, 
who never thought of kings ;" and that, instead of mingling with 
the troubles which deface the creation, he only existed to make 
his thoughts the mirror of its beauty and magnificence. Another 
English critic* has blamed Edwin's vision of the fairies as too 
splendid and artificial for a simple youth ; but there is nothing 
in the situation ascribed to Edwin, as he lived in minstrel days, 
that necessarily excluded such materials from his fancy. Had 
he beheld steam-engines or dockj^ards in his sleep, tlie vision 
might have been pronounced to be too artificial ; but he might 
have heard of fairies and their dances, and even of tapers, gold, 
and gems, from the ballads of his native country. In tlie second 
book of the poem there are some fine stanzas ; but he has taken 
Edwin out of the school of nature and placed him in his own — 
that of moral philosophy ; and hence a degree of languor is 
experienced by the reader. 

Soon after the publication of the ' Essay on Truth,' and of 
the first part of ' The Minstrel,' he paid his first visit to London. 
His reception in the highest literary and polite circles was dis- 
tinguished and flattering. The University of Oxford conferreil 
on him the degree of doctor of laws, and the sovereign himself, 
besides honouring him with a personal conference, bestowed on 
him a pension of 200/. a-year. 

On his return to Scotland there \vas a proposal for transferring 
* Dr. Aikin. 



BEATTIE. 435 



him to the University of Edinburgh, which he expressed his 
wish to decline from a fear of those personal enemies whom he 
had excited by his * Essay on Truth.' This motive, if it was his 
real one, must have been connected with that weakness and irri- 
tability on polemical subjects which have been already alluded 
to. His metaphysical fame perhaps stood higher in Aberdeen 
than in Edinburgh ; but to have dreaded personal hostility in 
the capital of a religious country, amidst thousands of individuals 
as pious as himself, was a weakness unbecoming the professed 
champion of truth. For reasons of delicacy, more creditable to 
his memory, he declined a living in the church of England which 
was offered to him by his friend Dr. Porteous. 

After this there is not much incident in his life. He pub- 
lished a volume of his Essays in 1776, and another in 1783, 
and the outline of his academical lectures in 1790. In the same 
year he edited, at Edinburgh, Addison's papers in * The Spec- 
tator,' and wrote a preface for the edition. He was very unfor- 
tunate in his family. The mental disorder of his wife, for a long 
time before it assumed the shape of decided derangement, broke 
out in caprices of temper, which disturbed his domestic peace, 
and almost precluded him from having visitors in his family. 
The loss of his son, James Hay Beattie, a young man of highly 
promising talents, who had been conjoined with him in his 
professorship, was the greatest though not the last calamity of 
his life. He made an attempt to revive his spirits after that 
melancholy event by another journey to England, and some of 
his letters from thence bespeak a temporary composure and 
cheerfulness ; but the wound was never healed. Even music, of 
which he had always been fond, ceased to be agreeable to him, 
from the lively recollections which it excited of the hours which 
he had been accustomed to spend in that recreation with his 
favourite boy. He published the poems of this youth, with a 
partial eulogy upon his genius, such as might be well excused 
from a father so situated. At the end of six years more his 
other son, Montague Beattie, was also cut off in the flower of 
his youth. This misfortune crushed his spirits even to temporary 
alienation of mind. With his wife in a madhouse, his sons dead, 
and his own health broken, he might be pardoned for saying, 
as he looked on the corpse of his last child, " I have done with 
this world." Indeed he acted as if he felt so ; for though he 



436 LIVES OF TLE POETS 



performed the duties of his professorship till within a short time 
of his death, he applied to no study, enjoyed no society, and 
answered but few letters of his friends. Yet amidst the depth 
of his melancholy he would sometimes acquiesce in his childless 
fate, and exclaim, " How could I have borne to see their elegant 
minds mangled with madness ! " 



CHRISTOPHER ANSTEY. 

[Born, 1724. Died, 1805.] 

The first publication in English verse of this light and amusing 
poet was ' The New Bath Guide,' which appeared in 1766. The 
droll and familiar manner of the poem is original, but its leading 
characters are evidently borrowed from Smollett.* Anstey 
gave the copy price of the piece, which was 200/., as a charit- 
able donation to the hospital of Bath ; and Dodsley, to whom 
it had been sold, with remarkable generosity restored the copy- 
right to its author, after it had been eleven years published. i 
His other works hardly require the investigation of their date. 
In the decline of life he meditated a collection of his letters and 
poems ; but letters recovered from the repositories of dead friends 
are but melancholy readings ; and, probably overcome by the 
sensations which they excited, he desisted from his collection. 

* [Anstey was the original, for 'Humphrey Clinker' was not out till 1771, 
nor written before 1770. This inadvertency of Mr. Campbell has been 
ointed out by Lord Byron in the Appendix to the 5th canto of ' Don Juan."; 
" But Anstey's diverting satire," says Sir Walter Scott, '• -was but a slight 
sketch compared to the finished and elaborate manner in which Smollett 
has, in the first place, identified his characters, and then fitted them with 
language, sentiments, and powers of observation, in exact correspondence 
with their talents, temper, condition, and disposition." — Misc. Fr. Works, 
vol. iii. p. 160.] 



THE END. 



London : Priated by William Ciowes aud Sons, Stamford Street. 



.y 



SEP 2 9 19W> 










■^.''O.K 



% 






x'i^ °'-- 












^^^ 

.%^^ 












*' }^ ^' Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 

Q^^^^ .^^.^ Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 

^ 9p "" ' ^ \^ ^ Treatment Date: Jan. 2009 

'^n^o "^ ^^ * Av¥/ PreservationTechnologies 

. ^ ^V : f>V^' .WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATIOM 

--^ -- K*^ ^ 111 Thomson ParKOnve 



"rf 



.11 



o. %r :-*^ ^^' 9d/-o\>^ ^' 






V'"-^\^^ 9?.*'«.^*\/ V%„^:^\/ 

"^^i^^^ ^^i^^% ^^:^;^/^ 

^ .^^^.^^ ^^fe'^^ ^^fc^^ 

"^ % V ^' "'^ ^ . V ^ ^ * « ^ % ' ' V ^ X 










4 




■%H** AJ 



Tls^^^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 386 667 A 







:^ 










